Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made his first visit to the troubled southern border Wednesday and didn’t miss taking the opportunity to slam President Joe Biden and California Governor Gavin Newsom over the illegal alien crisis.
Speaking at a roundtable discussion in Sierra Vista, Arizona, with Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels and other law enforcement officials, DeSantis first lit into the president, charging that he’s allowing this country to fall on its face (bolding mine):
We have a great country. We’ve got a proud history, but this country is falling on its face with respect to ensuring the sovereignty of our country, and you see the damage that’s been done at the southern border. We’ve been hearing about this problem for many, many years, many, many decades, and yet it’s probably as bad as it’s ever been right now.
I think that this has been a massive dereliction of duty by the by the President. You know, you’re the president–you would think that you would take a sense of pride in ensuring that the territorial integrity of your country is actually respected. You’d think that if that wasn’t the case, that you would feel that you would need to maybe do something about it. Instead, we’ve seen almost two and a half years of disaster upon disaster.
I don’t know how you could just sit there and let the country be overrun with millions and millions of people coming illegally and massive amounts of drugs coming in.
Watch:
Let’s look at some numbers. According to the House Committee on Homeland Security, they’re jaw-dropping:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had 211,401 alien encounters along the Southwest Border (SWB) in April 2023 — up almost 10% from the previous month and up nearly 20% from April 2021…
In just the first seven months of FY2023, 96 people whose names appear on the terrorist watchlist, including a shocking 16 in April alone, were stopped trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border between ports of entry…
So far in FY2023, nationwide, CBP has arrested 17,533 individuals with criminal convictions and apprehended 377 known gang members, 111 of those being MS-13 members…
In FY2023 alone, CBP has seized over 17,000 pounds of fentanyl coming across the Southwest border–enough to kill over 3.8 billion people…
DeSantis calls it “an American crisis.” But instead of just throwing verbal bombs, the governor actually wants to do something about it and pledged to work with other states and law enforcement agencies:
While the federal government leaves a void, the states need to step up, and local officials like the sheriffs need to step up. And so that’s one of the reasons why we’re here today, because we want to forge a a formal working relationship.
But he wasn’t going to walk away without thrashing Gavin Newsom, who seems increasingly unhinged lately and called DeSantis “a small pathetic man” and threatened to charge him with kidnapping for flying illegals from Florida to the Golden State. (He quickly backed down from that threat.)
Although DeSantis didn’t explicitly name the hair-gelled California governor, he basically told him, you made your bed–now go sleep in it:
These sanctuary jurisdictions are part of the reason we have this problem because they have endorsed and agitated for these types of open border policies.
They have bragged that they are sanctuary jurisdictions. They attacked the previous administration’s efforts to try to have border security. And so that’s the policies they’ve staken out. And then what? When when they have to deal with some of the fruits of that, they all of a sudden become very, very upset about that?
DeSantis puts his money where his mouth is regarding the border, sending troops and personnel in May, flying illegals to blue state havens like Martha’s Vineyard, and now going down there himself and coordinating with law enforcement. That’s a lot more than Border Czar Kamala Harris has ever done.
Here are just a few of the headlines RedState has run describing the chaos and human misery at the Rio Grande:
Skyrocketing Number of Deaths Shows Human Cost of Biden’s Border Policies–‘It’s Like a Graveyard’
Biden’s Border Blues: 53 Migrants Swept away in Rio Grande, 9 Drown
White House Response to Dead National Guardsman on the Border Will Make Your Skin Crawl
Border Crisis, COVID Policy Behind Massive Spike in Overdoses
Kamala Blames Trump Admin for Migrant Truck Casualty, Death Toll Rises to 53
Biden’s border policies are shameful, as is Newsom’s constant preening, and DeSantis is dead on target in calling them out for it.