Vice President Kamala Harris, tapped by President Joe Biden to fix the border crisis, has compared the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency she will have to rely on to the Ku Klux Klan, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) noted Friday.
He added that unless it changes its approach to immigration, the Biden administration is not up to the task of fixing the problems at the border.
Johnson briefed reporters about the situation at the southern border after touring the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, considered the epicenter of the migrant surge, and the Donna immigration processing center along with a delegation of 17 other GOP senators.
According to Johnson, as a senator, V.P. Haris “never” showed an interest in border security when serving on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Reform with him.
Johnson blasted President Joe Biden for delegating his leadership role in the worsening migration crisis to Harris, who has been critical of the immigration agents she will depend on.
“While we are clear that people should not come to the border now, we also understand that we will enforce the law,” Harris said when she was appointed to her new role.
Sen. Johnson emphasized that in 2018 then-Sen. Harris compared ICE to the KKK during a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing chaired by the Wisconsin senator.
I saw how she asked questions of federal law enforcement, these people that we do need to thank and thank their families for their service and sacrifice. She was never interested in securing the border.
Instead, what she did is she actually compared a federal law enforcement agency, ICE, to the Ku Klux Klan. Now that is a person President Biden has put in charge of solving this problem. How can you do that when you have to rely on the brave men and women of [ICE] … You’re putting a person in charge of the [ICE] efforts someone who has compared … [the agency’s] efforts to the Ku Klux Klan. I just don’t get it.
As Senator, Harris also called for reforming ICE, a component of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, telling MSNBC, “We need to probably think about starting from scratch.”
ICE, a component of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, handles the investigative and enforcement responsibilities of immigration and customs in the country’s interior, including detentions and deportations.
Its stated mission is:
To protect America from the cross-border crime and illegal immigration that threaten national security and public safety. This mission is executed through the enforcement of more than 400 federal statutes and focuses on immigration enforcement and combating transnational crime.
The Republican delegation stressed that the situation at the border was preventable.
Early this week, a former Trump-era DHS secretary said his department warned the incoming Biden folks that there would be a crisis if the president dismantled the measures implemented by his predecessor.
Referring to the crisis in the Rio Grande Valley and the Donna processing center, Johnson told reporters:
This is so sad. This is depressing. This didn’t have to happen. This is a self-inflicted wound on our nation, and I just do not believe the Biden administration is up to the task to fixing it unless they completely change stripes here. … This is a tragedy.
He said that over 6,000 migrants crossed the border in the Rio Grande Valley region in just one day.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) led a delegation of GOP lawmakers from the lower chamber on a trip to a section of the Texas-Mexico border, where they visited a processing center in El Paso.
“It’s more than a crisis. This is a human heartbreak. The sad part about all this is it didn’t have to happen,” McCarthy said of the situation, echoing the Senators.
Unlike the Biden administration, the GOP delegations from both chambers described what they saw as a “crisis” that erupted after the president reversed many of the Trump administration policies to secure the United States-Mexico border.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) noted that immigration authorities were holding children in cages at the Donna processing center, which he said is substantially over capacity.
“All of us today witnessed the ‘Biden cages.’ What is occurring here on the border is heartbreaking, and it is a tragedy,” Cruz said.
Cruz and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) led the congressional delegation this week.
Cruz again blasted the Biden administration for not allowing the media to accompany the Senators inside the Donna facility
Nevertheless, he and other delegation members released photos from inside the facility via Twitter showing some migrant children held in crowded enclosures that resemble cages.
The agents at the Donna facility also threw coronavirus-positive migrants in cages, he added.
“What we saw [at the Donna facility] were young people crammed in like sardines, something none of us would want for any of our own children,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) said.