WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, yesterday joined The Ingraham Angle on Fox News to discuss his questioning of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, in which Mayorkas defended the Biden Administration’s plan to defund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), despite the unprecedented border crisis that this Administration has created.
Partial Transcript
Hagerty on the Biden Administration’s plans to secretly defund ICE: “It’s Orwellian to hear him [DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas] speak, and I think this is what has the American public so frustrated, Laura—and beyond frustrated. They’re angry about what’s happening at our southern border, and this is the architect of that strategy. Today, he could not tell me anything that was truthful at all. He denied the fact that they’re asking for now the authority to repurpose all of ICE’s budget. They want to basically defund ICE […] This is his own request, his own budgetary request, that he put forward to us, that basically asked [for] the latitude to reprogram the entirety of the ICE budget and use it for basically turning ICE into a travel agency, to welcome people here, send them by airplane to New York City, and put them into hotels. That’s what he wants to do: Reprogram up to the entirety of ICE’s budget to do just that.”
Hagerty on the Biden Administration’s self-inflicted national security and humanitarian crisis at the southern border: “We had security at the border under President Trump. He’d taken this illegal immigration down to a trickle. [The Biden Administration] came in and blew up everything. And you’ve got people like [White House Press Secretary] Karine Jean-Pierre [and] Secretary Mayorkas, who are just talking in one direction and doing something completely different.”
Hagerty on the future of America if Joe Biden is re-elected: “The American public better watch out because we’ve already seen seven million, eight million illegal immigrants coming across this border; we’ll be at 10 million by the time this Administration’s over with. We’ll see another 10 million come to our country illegally.”
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