April 23, 2021 - Epoch Times
10:12
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| If you did this in America, it'd be child neglect. | |
| Here it's immigration. | |
| Illegal border crossings have surged in recent months, with record numbers of families and unaccompanied minors entering the U.S. These are not apples-to-apples numerical comparisons. | |
| This is literally the worst it has ever been from an operational standpoint. | |
| What are the costs of this surge? | |
| The people who talk about helping the rest of the world are willing to sacrifice our poor people to do that. | |
| In this episode, we sit down with Ken Cuccinelli, former Acting Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. | |
| Now, he's a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. | |
| We look at the border crisis and how it might impact future U.S. elections. | |
| They're designing a system so easy to cheat, one can only conclude that's the purpose. | |
| This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Jan Jekielek. | |
| Ken Cuccinelli, so great to have you back on American Thought Leaders. | |
| My pleasure. | |
| Good to be with you again. | |
| So, Ken, here we're going to talk about something that you've been writing about recently, basically the intersection of border security, something obviously you're very familiar with, and something else that you're very familiar with, which is election integrity. | |
| Before we jump into that, I want to talk a little bit about the situation at the border as you understand it right now. | |
| Right. | |
| So it's actually worse than you're even reading. | |
| The simple explanation for that is, let's take March, you had 172,000 people apprehended, probably another 30 or more thousand what we call gotaways. | |
| And heavily family-oriented, lots of children, many unaccompanied, from places other than Mexico. | |
| Mexico's the easiest return country. | |
| And so when you hear people say, oh, this is the most since 2005 or 1995, that's misleading. | |
| And it's misleading in this way. | |
| The Border Patrol facilities And the Border Patrol itself are designed and geared to catch and return adult Mexican males. | |
| Because historically that's been the overwhelming population crossing the border. | |
| So those facilities aren't built for families. | |
| They aren't built for children. | |
| The Border Patrol, I mean, just think of their vehicles. | |
| I get you in the middle of the desert. | |
| Where do I put you? | |
| You know, it's one thing if it's a bunch of guys you throw in the back of a truck. | |
| It's quite another if you've got families and children and so forth. | |
| The logistics Of March's 172,000 is probably more like 500,000 of what they were getting in 2005 or 1995. | |
| And in 1995, you saw some months over 100,000 in particular. | |
| The mid-90s were high, but it was overwhelmingly Mexican crossings, Mexican male crossings, adults. | |
| So the logistics involved with handling an adult are minuscule compared to children and families. | |
| So, you know, I just want your viewers to understand these are not apples to apples numerical comparisons. | |
| This is literally the worst it has ever been from an operational standpoint. | |
| And as the Deputy Secretary, I was the Chief Operating Officer for the Department of Homeland Security. | |
| This is a perspective I understand very well. | |
| And we have never seen anything like what we're seeing right now on the border. | |
| And as you and I talk, it's been three months since Joe Biden was sworn in. | |
| And in those three months, we've already filled up, way beyond capacity, every facility we have in the Department of Homeland Security, ICE and CBP, anywhere near the border. | |
| They're renting hotels at a crazy pace. | |
| They're way beyond their capacity. | |
| And over 40% of the Border Patrol is doing caretaking and diaper changing instead of law enforcement and national security and border security. | |
| Because of these operational differences as you're describing them. | |
| So just to clarify this 500,000 number, you're saying it's as if there were 500,000? | |
| Yeah, if it was the same population as the last time we saw numbers reaching over 170,000 in a month. | |
| But those were all... | |
| Overwhelmingly adult male Mexicans. | |
| That is not what we got in March. | |
| Huge proportion of families and unaccompanied children. | |
| We have more unaccompanied children in our custody now than at any time in recent history, period. | |
| Maybe ever. | |
| And you can't just catch and release children. | |
| You actually have to vet where you place them. | |
| You have to do all sorts of extra steps with children for all sorts of obvious reasons. | |
| For humanitarian reasons. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| And that's if you don't return them to their home country and just return them to their home country's government, which is the simplest solution, yet it is not one this administration is undertaking. | |
| And because they don't undertake it, they actually inspire more illegal Travelers. | |
| The drug cartels are doing very well. | |
| The human smugglers are doing very well on all this. | |
| But there's no end in sight because this administration hasn't adopted a single policy, not one, that would slow down the flow. | |
| Well, so how is it that This surge, as it's being described, actually happens. | |
| There's presumably policy. | |
| We've talked with Chad Wolf about this maybe three weeks ago. | |
| But what policy do you see as fueling this, or what is fueling this? | |
| Well, it doesn't even start with policy. | |
| It starts with the perception of the commitment from the president. | |
| And the world, thinking of coming to the United States illegally, perceives this president as inviting them in, not merely tolerant of illegal immigration, but desirous of it. | |
| When was the last time you saw illegal immigrants show up at the border with the president's political t-shirts on, like it's a political rally, and demanding he keep their promises to them? | |
| Non-American, non-citizens entering the country illegally. | |
| I mean, they start their life off in this country as criminals by breaking our law. | |
| And that is where it starts. | |
| It doesn't even start with policy. | |
| It starts with message. | |
| Because you can have whatever policies in place you want. | |
| If you have an executive branch unwilling to enforce them or implement them, they don't matter. | |
| So the president is actually the most important single element in what you can expect to see in your immigration flows, illegal immigration flows. | |
| And Joe Biden has inspired more of a tsunami than any president in history, unfortunately, with no end in sight right now. | |
| So it starts with the president. | |
| He has caused this. | |
| There's a reason it's called the Biden effect. | |
| And that continues on and abated up to this point. | |
| You know, you highlighted the idea of illegal alien and illegal immigration. | |
| There's actually right now, I believe, an initiative to change the naming of that. | |
| I wrote down that illegal alien is going to be migrant or undocumented, non-citizen or undocumented individual and some other kind of related changes. | |
| Your thoughts on this? | |
| Well, this administration has demonstrated very quickly and very clearly they're not very committed to the truth. | |
| And this is just one more example of it. | |
| The statutes themselves, the laws, use the word alien. | |
| We didn't make that up. | |
| That's been the terminology in this country for Well before you and I were born. | |
| And when people come here illegally, they are here illegally. | |
| So to say they're an illegal alien is simply to track the statute and to describe truth as it is. | |
| They are trying to mitigate the criminality of breaking into this country, of invading the United States. | |
| And they're doing that for other purposes, because this isn't happening in a vacuum. | |
| This policy is not unintentional, it is intentional. | |
| It's occurring at the same time that the House has passed not one, but two amnesty bills, sometimes with Republican support, and they're trying to pass a voting bill. | |
| In which millions of these folks crossing the border in the next couple of years are going to be swept onto the voter rolls if that became the law because of the automatic registration provisions in that bill. | |
| You and I look at the border and we're talking about a crisis, a humanitarian crisis and so forth, and that's all correct. | |
| They look at the border, the radical left looks at that border and they see a voter registration line. | |
| And they're very confident, I think incorrectly, but they're very confident that these are future votes for their radical left agenda. | |
| So you've just watched part of my interview with Ken Cuccinelli. | |
| As you probably know, YouTube has shown itself to be ready to censor all sorts of important news and content. | |
| This isn't really acceptable to us here at the Epoch Times, and I don't actually want to be sitting around thinking about what YouTube may or may not want when I'm deciding who to interview or what I'm going to talk about. | |
| Furthermore, YouTube has actually demonetized us. | |
| It's been over two months now since that's been the case. | |
| It's been under review. | |
| We're not being terribly, terribly hopeful about this. | |
| So what are we going to do? | |
| Well, we're launching Epoch TV. Epoch TV is a whole platform where we're going to have multiple programs, American Thought Leaders, of course, Crossroads with Joshua Phillip, the Larry Elder Show. | |
| Awesome stuff. | |
| $4.99 a month. | |
| That's what it's going to open with. | |
| And I invite you to see the rest of the interview here on our platform. |
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