Tom Cotton on Border Crisis: 'If You Let Them in, More Will Come'

President Joe Biden’s immigration policies are driving an increase in migration across the southern border, said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with Alex Marlow, author of Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption.

“The simple principle is, if you let them in, more will come,” Cotton stated, “and that’s what we’ve seen every month since the election with the anticipation that Joe Biden would open the borders and give illegal aliens work permits and ultimately give them an amnesty. More have been coming.”

Cotton remarked, “If you do not let them in, if you turn them around and tell them to go back to Mexico or to Guatemala — which was a safe third country under the Trump administration — you don’t have to worry about how fast you process them [in America].”

Biden exempted minors in February from a public health emergency declaration related to immigration and coronavirus the Trump administration issued. Support for amnesty and political rhetoric from the White House and Democrats is a magnet for illegal immigration and human smuggling, Cotton noted.

“It is clear that the cartels and the smugglers have now put out the word announcing to Central America: the border’s opened, Joe Biden’s president; give us your life savings and we’ll get you into America,” Cotton stated. “There are heartbreaking stories from families from Guatemala and Honduras and El Salvador being told that, getting to the border, and not be able to get in [sic], because we still are turning away most adults without children because of the public health emergency under federal law. However, Joe Biden explicitly exempted minors from that public health declaration.”

Cotton added, “Guess what? More minors are showing up.”

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Halting illegal immigration requires enforcement of border security, Cotton determined.

“What’s going to stop it is effective enforcement of our border,” he said. “Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Homeland Security, is not focused on enforcing the border. He’s focused almost solely on expediting the number of migrants he can get across the border and released into the country. That is the opposite of the signal we should be sending, because … when migrants get to our southern border, almost always the first thing they do is get on their phones and post on social media and send text messages back to their home country and tell them what the conditions are.”

Cotton remarked, “Three simple steps will end the crisis at the border tomorrow. First, re-enter the safe third country agreement. We have one with Guatemala and other South American countries, but Guatemala was the key one. Guatemala stretches from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. Anyone from Central or South America passes through it. When they get to the border, if they haven’t demonstrated they applied for asylum in Guatemala, tell them go back to Guatemala and apply for asylum there. That was stopping 98 percent of all economic migrants.

“Second, re-enter the Remain in Mexico policy with Mexico for those very few migrants who did process through Guatemala,” Cotton continued. “That required them to stay at our southern border and seek their American asylum claim without being released for 18 or 24 months into the country, but rather, in Mexico. Again, that turned most of them away.”

Cotton went on, “Finally, apply the public health exclusionary order to all migrants, period. Those three things combined will immediately send the word back to the home country that the border is not open and that you cannot come. Joe Biden could do do all those things tomorrow. He doesn’t need a single penny. He doesn’t need a single law passed from Congress. He can do all of it.

“That’s why this is Biden border crisis, because he created the conditions for this crisis,” Cotton concluded.