Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) traveled to the Rio Grande on Thursday night and said he saw “cartel members” on the Mexican side of the border “waving flashlights, yelling and … taunting border patrol” agents.
“We are at the edge of the river; on the other side of the river is Mexico,” the video began. “On the other side of the river, we have been listening to and seeing cartel members, human traffickers — right on the other side of the river.”
Cruz said cartel members have been “Waving flashlights, yelling and taunting Americans — taunting border patrol because they know under the current policy of the Biden administration they can flood over here.”
Cruz stated the cartel members are receiving “$4,000 or $5,000 dollars a person to smuggle” foreign nationals “into this country,” noting that Biden’s “policies, when they smuggle them in,” are for the immigrants to be released.
“Last month, 100,000 people came across the border illegally. We’ve got 15,000 kids in federal government custody,” Cruz articulated.
“We’ve already gone to detention facilities that are already overrun; many of them with families and small children. We saw multiple mothers who were nursing infant babies, who had just crossed over… being housed in outdoor holding pens, where they were sleeping on the floor and nursing their babies,” Cruz said.
Before Cruz called on the “Biden administration to put an end to… sanctioning lawless chaos on our southern border,” he said the situation is “a humanitarian crisis” and “a public health crisis,” due to illegal immigrants “testing positive for COVID-19 at a 17 times higher rate than the American population.”
Cruz is one of 18 Republican senators expected to travel to the border Friday.