Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made his second trip to the United States-Mexico border since kicking off his independent presidential campaign, calling President Joe Biden’s illegal immigration inflow “an existential threat to our country and our values.”
In a campaign video released Monday, Kennedy documented his trip to Cochise County, Arizona, which sits along the nation’s southwest border with Mexico.
There, Kennedy blasted Biden’s “opening of the border and the influx” of illegal immigration to American communities such as those in Cochise County where local taxpayers, hospital systems, public schools, and social services are taken to the brink of bankruptcy.
Watch video:
Cochise County Schools Superintendent Jacqui Clay told Kennedy that illegal aliens crossing the border attempt to enter the county’s public schools looking for water, shelter, and care after making the often-deadly journey via the Mexican drug cartels.
Sometimes, students even witness those who die in the process, Clay said:
Students cannot learn if they’re scared. Teachers cannot teach if they’re constantly looking over their shoulders. We have illegal people coming over, jumping the fences, knocking on the doors, shaking the doors trying to get in. We also have problems with students who are stepping over bodies. [Emphasis added]
With this one particular one, the body was tossed out of the car. An elementary school student, we’re talking about out in the rural area almost in the middle of nowhere, they’re getting on the bus and now they’re witnessing that. How can a student learn, seeing something like that, and then sharing it with their classmates and again, the doors rattling, people trying to get in, trying to get water. [Emphasis added]
Sierra Vista Mayor Clea McCaa told Kennedy that cartel smugglers who pack their vehicles with illegal aliens are often caught driving 105 to 115 mph in school zones. In many cases, Cochise County Attorney Brian McIntyre said, the smugglers are local high school students hoping for big payouts as the cartels make up to $1,500 per illegal alien smuggled across.
“… there’s been police car chases that have ended up probably 100 feet from one of the elementary schools,” McCaa said.
WATCH — Migrant Surge in Arizona Crippling Border Patrol Resources:
Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels said the situation was not always this way.
“President Obama was the first president to remodel the wall,” Dannels told Kennedy:
[Obama] left office and it fell into Trump’s administration and then Trump was the first president to extend the barrier — the first president to extend it. [Emphasis added]
And then Biden came in and shut it all down by claiming the southwest border a non-emergency. And instead of working with locals … working with sheriffs, mayors, and governors, that has not happened. [Emphasis added]
Dannels described one instance where he personally delivered “a 16-point plan on how to secure the border” to Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Months later, Dannels said he asked the secretary about the secure border plan to which Mayorkas responded, “Did you give me something sheriff?”
“The policies of the administration, they’ve done the exact opposite of what they’ve intended,” Willcox Police Chief Dale Hadfield told Kennedy. “If anybody thinks that because human bodies are coming across that drugs are not, they’re sorely mistaken. It’s all a game.”
One of those Biden policies, noted by Kennedy, was to halt all border wall construction upon taking office in late January 2021. Dannels said that as a result, wall materials that had already been purchased by the federal government went wasted and 90 percent have since been sold off as scrap metal.
While hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens arrive at the southern border every month under Biden’s DHS, the administration has admitted that about 85 percent of all illegal alien arrivals are being released into American communities.
Most recently, as Breitbart News reported, Mayorkas refused to disclose to Congress a full accounting of every illegal alien released into the U.S. interior since January 2021.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.