WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) Saturday joined Cavuto Live on Fox News to discuss Vice President Kamala Harris’s trip to the southern border and the ongoing national security crisis, as well as the recent infrastructure negotiations.
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Partial Transcript Below:
Hagerty on VP Harris border visit: “Thankfully President Trump is putting more pressure on the Biden Administration than anybody else has been able to because I think she rushed to the border to get there before President Trump did. Of course, she went to the wrong place. President Trump will be right where the heat of the action is, but this is part-and-parcel of a crisis that the Biden Administration has created. You know I went to Guatemala and Mexico fully a month before Vice–President Harris did. I met with the President of Guatemala. He told me what the root cause is. She talks about the root cause all the time, but the root cause are the messages coming from the Biden White House, encouraging people to come, encouraging children to be reunited. The coyotes market this immediately. They encourage families to put their life savings into the hands of these coyotes and put their children at risk. And you heard about what’s happening, 20 children left at the border like this. They’ve created a humanitarian crisis. And I warned at the beginning, it’s going to come to a town near you and me. It’s happening right here in Tennessee. Now they’re shipping these unaccompanied minor children to Tennessee. Reports last week of one of them being lost here in Chattanooga, Tennessee. This is a humanitarian crisis, as well. And it’s the Biden Administration’s own doing.”
Hagerty on border crisis coming to Tennessee: “They’ve not been forthcoming, and Senator Marsha Blackburn, Congressman Chuck Fleischmann, and I have put an immense amount of pressure on the administration to be more forthcoming, to be visible about what’s happening. Look, our local schools don’t know what to expect. They’re already overcrowded. What’s going to happen? Our hospital system doesn’t know whether there’ll be overwhelmed by this flow of people coming into the system. Law enforcement also needs to know what’s happening. Yet, the Department of Homeland Security and HHS have been mum. We’ve written them. We’ve written Secretary Becerra. We’ve written to [Secretary] Mayorkas. We’ve actually put forward legislation now to force them to come clean in terms of what’s happening with this movement of migrants all over America. They’ve turned our border into a turnstile. Now what they’re doing, they’re not focused on border security. They’re focused on processing people and moving them to the interior of America and what’s coming with it? More drugs. Sheriffs in Tennessee tell me fentanyl deaths, fentanyl overdoses are up dramatically since the border collapsed in January. More methamphetamine is coming across the border. This is a true crisis.”
Hagerty on El Paso being called the new Ellis Island: “I was shocked to hear that. It really does reveal their whole strategy here. It is converting our border from a secure location, protecting our nation to, as I said, it’s turning it into a turnstile. They are fundamentally trying to reshape America on so many dimensions. You look at the ‘infrastructure package’, quote, unquote, that they’re trying to push through. It’ll destroy our economy. You look at what they’re doing with this crisis at the border, they’re collapsing our border. They’re doing a remake of America so that the country will be unrecognizable. And it’s up to us to stand up against it.”
Hagerty on infrastructure negotiations: “Well, I’ve been a business person all my life, Neil, and what goes into a negotiation, often what’s not in the negotiation is every bit as critical as what is in the package. What happened here was Biden made it clear. This is not really a bipartisan deal. He’s made it clear that he’s going to put a completely partisan package right alongside it. This is the same bait-and-switch we’ve seen since the primary campaign with the Democrats. Bernie Sanders is standing right off in the offing, delighted to see that they’re going to shove all this through in the guise of bipartisanship. But what they’re talking about is, again, shoving the $6 trillion package through. They’re going to destroy the 2017 tax act that President Trump put in place that actually made our economy the strongest in the world. They want to see that all destroyed, inflation unleashed, taxes up, job killing policies throughout America, and more and more spending that’s going to make our country weaker.”
Hagerty on the disappointing infrastructure deal: “I just think that they must be very disheartened. I think that the people that came together thought that they were negotiating on the level. I think that what Biden revealed, can you imagine working as long and as hard as they did? I wasn’t part of this group, but I’ve been watching it. Working as long, and as hard as they did to come up with a deal and then Biden steps up and says, actually it’s not the deal we negotiated. And I’m going to put everything that we took out right alongside it. And I won’t sign one without the other.”