Two House Republicans vying for the top spot on the Homeland Security Committee gave rival speeches at a press event on Tuesday during a border visit.
Rep. Mark Green (R-TN) and Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) — who are both reportedly completing to be the chair of the Homeland Security Committee — gave rival speeches during a press event on Tuesday with Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
“President Biden, in his quest to change the landscape of America, has allowed in the past year — if you count got aways and encounters — 3.5 million people to illegally come into the United States,” Green stated, slamming the current administration for its “disastrous open border policies.” He added:
There are 21 states in our nation whose population is less than 3.3 million. He’s allowing a moderate-sized state into the nation every year. The added cost and uncompensated healthcare the massive demand on social services is destroying opportunities for less fortunate Americans.
Crenshaw, a former U.S. navy SEAL officer, claimed that the” citizens in El Paso could not sleep at night because Biden and his administration will not secure the border” before offering to wage war against the cartels in Mexico:
Across the river sits some of the most capable, best equipped, best funded and most ruthless and dangerous organizations in the world — the cartels. See this is more than an immigration crisis. It’s a national security crisis and they facilitate this crisis. And worse than that, they flood our country with deadly fentanyl that kills nearly 80,000 Americans a year. They are at war with us and we do nothing. Last week I introduced legislation to declare war on the cartels to give the government the tools needed to go after them and hunt them down and sanction anyone who aids and abets them. They don’t fear us, and that needs to change [Emphasis added].
Green’s pitch also emphasized the damage caused by the cartel’s drug smuggling across the border. “Texas is undergoing another invasion. All our border states need everything that we can give them. Joe Biden’s disastrous open border policies have turned operational control of the U.S. southern border over to the drug cartels.”
The Tennessee Republican went on to say that the cartels have “neutralize[d]” CBP by “forcing them to thin the line in remote areas and concentrate their forces and human crossing sites,” which end up allowing the cartels to then “push waves of camouflaged carpet shoe-wearing mules across the remote areas of the border with backpacks filled with fentanyl.” He continued:
Joe Biden has turned every state into a border state. [We need] To shine a light on the destruction to American families caused by the cartels poisoning drugs, to shine a light on the policy that is destroying our country by overwhelming communities like El Paso [or] Killeen, Texas where I lived for many years and Nashville where we now reside. It has to stop now.
“We assure the American people we will shine a light on this in the next few months,” he ended.
Additionally, while both were speaking, they said that President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas needs to resign or threaten him by holding him accountable.
Jacob Bliss is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jbliss@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter @JacobMBliss.