The migrant crisis at the southern border under President Joe Biden has made the U.S. less safe than it was when the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks occurred in 2001, former Rep. Mayra Flores, R-Texas, told Newsmax on Monday.
Flores, who in June 2022 won a special election to become the first Mexican-born woman to be elected to the House, is running to reclaim the seat she lost that November to Democrat Vicente Gonzalez.
The wife of a Border Patrol agent, Flores said "gun battles" in Mexico are affecting the lives of Texans who live near the border.
"We'll never forget 9/11 and in our hearts are those lives that were lost," Flores told "Newsline" hose Bianca de la Garza on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"Today in 2023, we're less safe than in 2001, on 9/11, and this is why it's so important for us to secure the border. And just this Saturday, I was at the southern border right across Matamoros, and we can hear the gun battles, we can see the Mexican cartel."
Flores added that family members in Matamoros "actually sent me a video that they were actually at their home [and] would not be able to come out because of the gun battle."
Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, also appeared during the segment with Flores and said that U.S. counterterrorism programs that had kept us pretty safe are "disintegrating."
"We are seeing people on the watchlist being accidentally released because everybody's too busy handling the family groups and processing them in," said Bensman, who then cited a Venezuelan-Lebanese terrorist being released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and an ISIS-connected smuggler moving "a bunch of Pakistanis over the border."
"I believe that that kind of a 9/11-type threat right now is very elevated — elevated to a point where I've never seen it," Bensman said.
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Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
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