As President Barack Obama threatens more executive orders on amnesty for illegal immigrants, Arizona Republican Governor Jan Brewer told Breitbart News, “We don’t want an imperial president dictating what we will do in our state.”
Brewer, who appears to be out of options when it comes to dealing with the White House and the crisis on the border, discussed the plight her state was facing at the Republican Governors Association conference in Aspen when the issue of Obama’s impending executive orders on immigration came up. Brewer believes nothing will potentially improve Arizona’s border circumstances until a new president is elected to office. The administration recently delivered 1,000 more young illegal immigrants to the state.
“Well, I think the people in Arizona, myself included, believe that [he is punishing Arizona]. He obviously has not been a help to Arizonans,” Brewer said. “He certainly hasn’t done his job with Arizona as far as making us safe and secure. We have the most porous border in the country, unfortunately for us.”
President Obama’s relationship with the voters of the Grand Canyon State has been essentially non-existent. During the 2008 presidential Democratic primary, he lost Arizona to Hillary Clinton and later failed to capture Arizona’s 11 electoral votes in both the 2008 and 2012 general elections by wide margins. The sour feelings continue through his second term.
Brewer and Obama’s famous war of words was seen two years ago on the Tarmac at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport. A photo showing Brewer wagging her finger at Obama went viral. According to Brewer in a Wall Street Journal interview, she went to the airport to greet the president, but he was angry with her over what she wrote about him in a book. She last spoke to the President at a White House social function in February. According to the Arizona GOP’er, neither one has spoken to one another since.
Brewer is “grateful” Texas Republican Governor Perry sent the National Guard to his state’s border, but she has no plans to order her state’s National Guard to Arizona’s shared border with Mexico.
“In Arizona we don’t have the resources by any stretch of the imagination. It would cost $12 million dollars a week to put border patrol on my border, and we don’t have that kind of money. We don’t have oil. We just don’t have the resources,” she said.
“But I think having the National Guard on their border is not deterring what we’re seeing in the families and the people who are coming, because that just means they’ll just turn themselves in to the National Guard to be turned in to the system to get into America, because they’re surrendering,”
Brewer added, explaining, “They’re not hiding from [border patrol], but the drug cartel will be deterred, so instead of coming over the Texas border, that balloon gets squeezed and then they come up through Arizona.”
“So then Arizona and my citizens will be the gateway once again for the drug cartels, and with that comes all the other problems we have to face, which I repeatedly said over and over again. The only answer that is ever going to solve this is to get everyone to the table and to get our border secured, so we can deal with all the people who are already in here and how we are going to deal with legal immigration, but until that gets done, I think our only hope is a new president.”