Democrat Rep. Val Demings (D-FL), who is challenging Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in the upcoming midterm race, said the U.S. does not have open borders, even as nearly five million illegal aliens have entered the U.S. since President Joe Biden took office.
Demings made the assertion during a Wednesday appearance on MSNBC’s The ReidOut.
“And look what you just talked about: an immigration bill. Now, he’ll [Rubio] complain about border security, which we all understand we need to secure our borders. No, we do not have open borders,” Demings declared.
“That’s almost an insult to the men and women on the ground there who protect our borders,” she continued:
Despite Demings’ assertion, nearly five million illegal immigrants have crossed the border since Biden took office. More specifically, a report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimated the figure to be around 4.9 million, as Breitbart News reported:
The president of FAIR Dan Stein discussed the report, stating that “Roughly the equivalent of the entire population of Ireland has illegally entered the United States in the 18 months President Biden has been in office, with many being released into American communities.”
He continued, saying “In that time, the Biden administration has blamed an unprecedented surge of illegal immigration on all sorts of external factors, except their own sabotage of our nation’s immigration laws.”
And with that comes drugs and crime. In July alone, authorities seized enough fentanyl — 2,071 pounds — to kill 469 million Americans. Rubio is among those leading the charge in working to make distribution of fentanyl chargeable as felony murder. Meanwhile, Demings is a supporter of amnesty, and during former President Donald Trump’s presidency, she deemed a wall an “absurd waste of money”
A recent Spectrum News/Siena College survey showed Rubio leading Demings by seven percentage points.