President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are showing they don't care about the escalating situation at the U.S.-Mexico border by refusing to visit the region and see the "crisis they created," Sen. Ted Cruz said Wednesday.
"It is a stunning lack of disregard," the Texas Republican said on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "They feel politically trapped. They made promises to their hard left-wing base. They won't enforce the border and (they) allow people to come and don't understand why that produced this crisis."
Biden, he added, is "detaining 17,000 unaccompanied kids" at the border, a move coming after last year under then-President Donald Trump, when "we had the lowest rate of illegal immigration in 45 years."
"Trump's "remain in Mexico" agreement dropped numbers dramatically by keeping Central Americans in Mexico while their asylum cases proceeded, Cruz added.
"Joe Biden ripped it to shreds and caused this crisis, replaced it with catch and release saying we are going to let people go," said Cruz. "It is heartbreaking. It is not right, these children, more than half of these children are being subject to physical abuse or sexual abuse when in the custody of human traffickers."
And, he added, "this is inhumane. This isn't kind. This is inhumane and both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want to wash their hands of it."
Cruz added that last week, when he brought a group of 19 senators to the Rio Grande, he observed several incidents that pointed to the "humanitarian disaster and crisis" that is under way.
"We saw three different nursing mothers sitting on the ground nursing infant children," said Cruz. "The next day we went to the Donna facility, a gigantic tent city that they built to handle this massive surge of illegal immigration," said Cruz.
"Its capacity with COVID constraints is 250 but over 4,000 people are crammed into Donna," he added. "They are not 6 feet apart or 3 feet apart or 6 inches apart. Children are side-by-side lying on the floor, no beds, cots, lying on the floor covered up in emergency blankets, and 10% of the population testing positive for COVID. It is a humanitarian disaster and crisis and it is man-made. Joe Biden caused this."
Cruz also slammed Biden for his planned announcement in Pittsburgh of his $2 trillion proposed infrastructure plan.
"This has been an administration of the government by the government for the government," said Cruz. "The only thing it appears they are in favor of is more government spending, more taxes, and more government power over your lives. Across the country, millions of small businesses are hurting. We had a horrific year with the pandemic, with Democrat officials mandating shutdowns, millions of small businesses shutting down and now Joe Biden wants to jack up taxes on small business owners destroying jobs."
He said he finds it particularly ironic that Biden is making his announcement in Pittsburgh after he started his administration by ending the Keystone XL pipeline with the "stroke of a pen."
"He destroyed 11,000 jobs, including 8,000 union jobs, and announced he is reentering the Paris agreement which will destroy again hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country, blue-collar working-class jobs," said Cruz. "Joe likes to say he is from Scranton. The people from Scranton are getting the short end of the stick with the government hammering energy jobs, oil and gas jobs, steel jobs. Any job where you're making something your job is getting more endangered because of Joe Biden's giving in to the radical left."
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.
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