WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) today joined Varney & Co. on Fox Business to discuss the eye-opening reality of the national security and humanitarian crisis he witnessed at the southern border and to warn against eliminating Title 42 after seeing the calamity first hand.
Partial Transcript
Hagerty on the dangers of ending Title 42: “I took a group of Tennessee… sheriffs, Tennessee mayors, down to the border. They see what’s happening in our home state as this unfolds—the movement of migrants in the dark of night, the drug flow… We spent three days on the ground, and Friday night I was in the evening muster—that’s when the leadership brings the border patrol agents together—there, they explained that President [Joe] Biden is going to lift Title 42, the last tool that our border agents have to actually turn back the tide of people flooding across the border. You could just feel the wave of depression settling over the room… They were very, very dejected at this because on May the 23rd, President Biden has basically sent out an open invitation. There’s going to be a tidal wave of human immigration coming across the border. I’m certain that the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] and the cartels are ramping up drug production to all-time high levels. They’re killing our kids here in America. They’re moving these people all over the United States and they’re turning every town into a border town in the process.”
Hagerty on the lack of transparency from the Biden Administration in migrant resettlement: “The first time it was uncovered that they were moving these migrants quietly, surreptitiously in the middle of the night, it happened in my home state of Tennessee in Chattanooga and Knoxville. Senator [Marsha] Blackburn, Congressman [Chuck] Fleischmann, and I immediately reached out to the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Secretary of Homeland Security to demand that they let us know who’s coming. Look, our schools need to know what to expect in terms of added capacity. Our hospitals need to know what kind of burden is going to hit them. Law enforcement officers in our state need to know what’s coming. They will not comply. They will not let us know. They’re doing all of this in secret. And this is creating again, issues that are going to have to be dealt with across the United States. They’re taxing our system and they refuse to let us know what’s happening. I’ll tell you this, Stuart: if my Democrat colleagues had been with me these past three days down at the border, I can’t believe they would tolerate what’s happening there.”
Hagerty on how eliminating Title 42 will debilitate border patrol: “It’s so depressing. The capacity right now at the border is processing 5,000 people a day. They’re already at seven to 8,000… which means they’re pulling frontline border patrol officers off the line, bringing them back doing administrative duties. So already the border is getting more and more porous, opening up more and more holes to push, you know, high-value, very dangerous individuals, as well as more drugs. When they go to 18,000, it’s going to collapse their capacity to deal with this. They will be nothing but processing. They’ll be doing nothing to defend our border. We’ll be completely vulnerable. And I would’ve mentioned the national security crisis that I saw. Over the past year, we’ve encountered 157 different nationalities crossing our border… There are only 195 countries recognized by the UN [United Nations]. 157 nationalities have been apprehended just since Joe Biden took office. This is a national security crisis beyond proportion.”
Hagerty on the nefarious control of Mexican cartels: “The cartels completely control the flow of human beings coming across that border. They’ve taken charge of the entire Mexican border along the Rio Grande… These are multi-billion-dollar cartels. Again, they work in partnership with the Chinese Communist Party and the gangs there to bring fentanyl across the border. That’s their business is the drug trade. They use humans as a way to distract and divert… our border security… [the cartels] tax them [migrants], abuse them, put them into human and sex trafficking trades, and again, use them as a means to move their illicit drugs across the border.”
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