EAGLE PASS, TX— United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Appropriations and Foreign Relations Committees, today joined Mornings With Maria on Fox Business from the southern border to discuss his observations during his visit to the southern border with Tennessee sheriffs, mayors, and local officials, as well as his opposition to the Senate Foreign Aid package, and the impeachment of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Partial Transcript
Hagerty on his opposition to the Senate Foreign Aid Package: “The package that passed was extremely lacking in terms of direction, in terms of focus, in terms of giving anything other than just as [President] Joe Biden says, ‘we’ll be in it for as long as it takes.’ There’s no plan to win; there hasn’t been. It’s something that left out everything having to do with securing our own border, which the people of Tennessee have demanded. We’ve got to preserve the sanctity of our own nation before we go out and spend billions more defending other nations. So, it’s got a huge miss, a huge gap, in terms of not dealing with our national security crisis here at home, yet it’s called a National Security bill. It’s missing the point. What’s happening in the House [of Representatives] right now, I think they’re trying to cobble together something that might be a middle ground, but they well better get clear that this border needs to be addressed right away. Joe Biden could do it; [he] has no interest in doing it obviously. They put together a border bill, a border package, as they called it, would not allow us to amend it or fix it, up and down vote, and we go straight to Ukraine with no effort to fix the border. They were never serious about this; It’s just a ‘messaging bill’ for them so that they can have some of their more vulnerable members on record.”
Hagerty on what he has seen at the southern border: “I brought down a group of Tennessee Sheriffs, mayors, law enforcement officers here to the Del Rio sector, to Eagle Pass yesterday; I’m here today and we’ll be back out today. We’re sending the Tennessee National Guard to support Governor [Greg] Abbott’s effort here, Operation Lone Star, with his local [Department of Public Safety]. We’re going to be sending Tennessee National Guardsmen down here to support it. And what we’ve seen, what’s very obvious, is if you enforce the law that’s on the books, and the people that are coming across the Eagle Pass now are being arrested by the Texas DPS for trespassing, guess what’s happened? They’ve stopped coming across. But what we’ve got to do, Tom Homan was very clear about the balloon effect—you’ve heard him discuss this—you’ve got to shut down the entire border because when they shut it down here, they’ve got a rash of people coming through Arizona; they’ve lost control of the border—you’ve heard about all the Chinese entering California right now—we’ve got to secure the entirety of the border. Joe Biden has the tools to do it. He simply refuses to, and again, they put forward these ‘messaging packages’ that would frankly, if it were passed as written, would make the situation even worse […] Talking about the Border Patrol, we met with the Vice President of the National Border Patrol Union. He’s actually the President of the area right here in the Del Rio Sector, and he went through the numbers with us. They are just staggering in terms of the continued loss of control, the continued flow—it’s an invasion at our southern border. But he also said this: once Texas stepped up and began to enforce the law, things have calmed down dramatically here. But his colleagues, as I said, in other parts of the border, again, if you look further to other parts just to Texas or to Arizona, California, they’re being crushed now with the deluge of people. When I met with Sheriff Coe, who I think our viewers can see on the screen now, he’s the sheriff of Kinney County. He said something very interesting, and I think it’s true. He said, ‘what he’s seeing here today in Texas, the rest of the nation will see tomorrow.’ And we went on a ranch of rancher Martin Wall, yesterday evening, last night, to see what’s happening there. He’s on a ranch that’s between the river and the railroad. This is where the gotaways go. These are people that don’t want to be caught. They’re turning down the white glove service that the Biden Administration is using to send people to New York City and put them up in hotels. These are bad people. What they’re doing is they’re cutting his fencing everywhere. He has not been able to run cattle for three years. They’ve destroyed his livelihood. He told me a story about walking into his living room. Maria, there were 20 adults, 20 adult males, all of them military age. He said in his living room, in his kitchen, they’d ransacked his refrigerator. He told them to leave; they refused. He’s just in a position where he can’t believe that he’s got to arm his children for them to go out on their own ranch. People shouldn’t have to live like this.”
Hagerty on the Biden Administration allowing dangerous illegal immigrants to travel across the U.S.: “It’s unbelievable. And what we saw, Mr. Wall pointed them out to us in the evenings, you can see these blinking blue lights. Those are comfort stations for the gotaways. Again, these are the bad guys. These are the military age males that are coming through that don’t want to be caught. They’re comfort stations with phone chargers there. Why do they need phone chargers? Because the coyotes and the cartels help them navigate their way into America using pin drops, and our taxpayer dollars are going to support that. We’re funding these comfort stations that are placed on his land and land all across the way as these—again, the worst of the worst—the gotaways are moving across his ranch, moving across his property, trying to get onto trains and take themselves into the interior of America.”
Hagerty on his legislation to stop illegal immigrants from being counted in the census: “I put legislation forward—we actually had a New York congresswoman on record saying that ‘she needs these illegal aliens in order to preserve her district for redistricting purposes.’—this is about power. At the end of the day, I think most Americans are shocked to find out that illegal aliens are counted in the allocation of congressional districts and in the allocation of electoral votes. That’s why this is happening. Otherwise, you think about the mass exodus from California, from New York, from Illinois, these blue states that have sanctuary cities now located in them: New York City, Chicago, San Francisco. These mayors are complaining, but they’re not changing their policy on sanctuary cities because they don’t want to lose their electoral power. They don’t want lose the electoral votes. In fact, they’re gaining them at the expense of states like my own in Tennessee because of these illegal aliens that are being counted and beefing up their numbers.”
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