Democrats are all for open borders until immigration starts affecting them, but it's fine when conservative areas in Texas are being slammed, Rep. Beth Van Duyne tells Newsmax in response to the mayors of Washington D.C. and New York City being angry over the additional migrants being sent to their cities.
"When it starts affecting their cities is when they say Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, we just don't want them here," the Texas Republican said on Newsmax's "John Bachman Now." "Let's send them down to Florida. Let's send them back to Texas."
New York City mayor Eric Adams, meanwhile, said his city is dealing with a "marked increase" in asylum seekers, with more than 2,800 entering the city's shelter system.
"In some instances, families are arriving on buses sent by the Texas and Arizona governments, while in other cases, it appears that individuals are being sent by the federal government," he said in a statement.
Texas and Arizona have been moving migrants to Washington, D.C., saying they want politicians to see what the crisis is like firsthand, and Van Duyne called the movie in Texas, spurred by Gov. Greg Abbott, "brilliant."
"It's fine until it starts affecting you," she said. "The utter hypocrisy of the left, I think, is on full display here. It's such a small number of illegals that are in their cities."
Van Duyne also on Monday said she agrees with former Attorney General Bill Barr's call in a Newsmax interview to start treating the Mexican drug cartels like terrorist organizations such as ISIS and less like the Mafia.
"When you've got more fentanyl coming illegally over your borders than we've ever seen before, when you've got terrorist organizations, suspected members of the terrorist list who have come over twice the number in this past year alone than all four years of the Trump administration, you need to start taking this seriously," Van Duyne said. "Yes, we should start treating them more like terrorist organizations.
"They have pumped enough illegal fentanyl into our country to kill Americans, every American woman and child 34 times over. We need to take that seriously, especially when you start looking at not only the deaths right now."
Meanwhile, Van Duyne said she does not agree with reports that the Biden administration could start issuing identification cards to illegal migrants to help them obtain benefits more quickly.
She added that she'd be concerned that once people get government-issued identification, which will eventually allow them to vote.
"We need to know who was in our country," she said. "We need to be able to do it in an orderly fashion. But every single decision every single policy this administration has put forward in the last year and a half is the exact opposite of doing that."
About NEWSMAX TV:
NEWSMAX is the fastest-growing cable news channel in America!
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.