Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) warned of “real murderers” entering America across its “extremely porous” southern border in a Monday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.
Scalise said, “President Trump made a signature piece of his campaign to finally secure the border. He’s not only campaigned on it, but the American people get what’s going on. There’s a real crisis. I see it all the time. People are dying. It’s not just the drugs and the human trafficking. There are real murderers that come across the border.”
Scalise noted, “Last week, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, there was a guy picked up. He had already been here illegally convicted of sex crimes against children [and] served his time. We deported him in 2016. He somehow came across the border — who knows when and what he’s done since then? — but they literally just picked him up again, last week. The border’s completely porous. We’ve got to secure it.”
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Scalise recalled recent negotiations on Capitol Hill regarding appropriations for border security funding.
“We were able to get some money,” explained Scalise. “Clearly not the full amount that the House passed when the Republicans were in charge — $5.7 billion — but we got $1.3 billion for the president to build new wall. There were some things that were important to finally open up some areas of the Rio Grande where — think about this, how ridiculous this is — the federal law said you can’t build wall where our border agents said we needed it the most. Those limitations finally got removed, but at the end of the day, now the president says he has issued an emergency declaration.”
Scalise continued, “Nancy Pelosi, this week, is going to bring legislation to try to block the president from being able to issue the emergency declaration. Nancy Pelosi went to the border this weekend and said there’s no crisis. How do you tell all those families who — every single week in America — we see people dying from people that are here illegally? And we see the crisis at the border.”
“We have a legal system of immigration,” added Scalise. “We need to get back to the rule of law, and respect the fact that you can come here legally. There’s a right way to do it. But if you just pour across the border whether it’s to bring drugs or to do harm to people, we’ve got to finally secure the border. I applaud President Trump for following through on his commitment to secure the border.”
Marlow remarked, “There’s no real constituency who wants an open border aside from the super-elite who fund some elements of the Republican Party and much of the Democratic Party, and that’s really all there is. The public doesn’t want an open border, and it seems like this is a huge opportunity for the right to really seize the mantle of law and order and to protect the American worker and the American citizen.”
Scalise responded, “You’re exactly right. When you talk to people, whatever they feel on different parts of immigration, whether it’s DACA [or] the interior loopholes that we need to close, right now the secretary of homeland security, if somebody comes to America illegally and commits a major crime, after they serve the time, depending on where they’re from, the secretary of homeland security has to get permission from the country they’re from to send them back. How ridiculous is that?”
Scalise went on, “These are the problems we have, but regardless of where you feel on all the other issues, just having border security is very popular even amongst Democrats, even amongst those who came to the country legally, because they followed the rules to come here. Some people wait over ten years to become a legal American citizen. What does it say to them, when you can literally have a felon who was deported in 2016 for abusing children somehow makes his way back into America? And it happens all the time.”
Marlow stated “This is a big myth that a bunch of legal immigrants want more illegal immigrants. It’s just not true.”
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