President Biden’s $105B security request—$14B for borders—fails as 3.8M migrants entered since 2021, with 1.5M evading capture, including terrorism suspects, while 7.4M illegal encounters and record fentanyl deaths (70K/year) expose systemic collapse. Heritage’s Laura Rees, a Trump-era DHS veteran, links the crisis to open-border ideology, Marxist policies, and sanctuary cities like NYC, where mayors exploit federal funds amid cartel-driven trafficking of 400K+ unaccompanied minors. She blames ICE’s neutered enforcement under Mayorkas, loopholes like the 2008 Trafficking Victims Act, and media suppression of border chaos, arguing Trump-era deterrents were sabotaged by the "deep state." Rees demands immediate border sealing, ending birthright citizenship, and employer penalties to force self-deportation, warning current policies erode sovereignty and security. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to this week's interview with security, border security expert Laura Rees.
Last week, President Biden gave a speech urgently requesting $105 billion in security funding, money that will come from a magic money tree that grows next to the magic energy tree on the planet Pandora.
Part of this money is going to be for Ukraine.
Some of it's going to be for Israel, but less commented upon was $14 billion, which is supposed to go to border security, which you might say is a good idea.
About 3.8 million people have entered the U.S. through its borders since Biden took office in 2021.
Nearly half of those slipped into the country illegally and were never caught.
After the attack in Israel, where murderous savages paraglided into the country to commit acts of Gothic cruelty, it might be nice to know who's coming into our country and what they're planning to do and where they are.
The fact is, the president has ignored this issue.
We won't answer questions about it at all.
His spokeswoman, Corine Jean-Pierre, says the border is not open when it obviously is.
Homeland Security head Alejandro Mayorkis says the border is secure when it obviously isn't.
You only have to turn off mainstream news and go on the cable or on X, and you'll see the pictures of people pouring across.
Even Democrats in cities that are now being just overrun by illegals are calling to the president for help and getting no answer.
So you might ask, if we're being so completely gaslighted and we've been gaslighted all this time, why should we believe that the money they're asking for now is going to help with actual border security?
I thought we would ask that question of someone who might actually know the answer.
Laura Reese is the director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation.
Prior to joining Heritage, Laura served as the acting deputy chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security and spent time in Congress as counsel for the U.S. House Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims.
Part of the time she was at Homeland Security was during the Trump administration.
Laura, thank you so much for coming on.
The money that Biden asked for last week, is this going to improve border security in any way, shape, or form?
No, it's going to make it worse.
It would actually accelerate our open borders and our border insecurity that we are already living with.
As you said, CBP Customs and Border Protection has reported 7.4 million illegal alien encounters under Biden, most of whom have been released into the U.S. Secretary Mayorkis won't report how many deportations they are doing, but we know the numbers are very low.
And in addition to that, we have at least 1.5 million known gotaways.
These are people who evaded the border patrol because they did not want their fingerprints taken.
They are either known or suspected terrorists on the terror watch list, smuggling drugs, trafficking people, or aggravated felons.
And they chose to decline a free airline ticket to anywhere they wanted to go in the U.S. because they are up to no good.
And so we already have national security threats in the country right now, and Congress needs to wake up before some of these terrorist cells do.
Just so I'm clear when you say that the extra money will make the situation worse, how, why mechanically is that true?
Because it's just going to feed this beast.
The Biden administration has shown no sign of changing course.
So any dollar you give to the Biden administration just continues this open border agenda and these open border operations.
They are going to continue to tell CBP to process these illegal aliens, future illegal aliens, into the country, to not deport them, and to give them all sorts of taxpayer-funded services, shelter, food, work authorization, and other social services.
So the gaslighting on this has been so complete, the idea that Homeland Security keeps telling us the border is secure.
It's almost like a Monty Python routine while these people are pouring in.
You can't blame people for feeling this is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of policy that we don't understand.
Can you explain this?
What is the idea here?
Well, the left now is bought into this open border ideology and agenda.
And for some people, they simply don't believe that there should be borders between countries, that anyone, anywhere on the planet, should be able to travel anywhere they want to without restriction or limitation.
So that's one aspect of it.
But also the left views this as future political gain, whether it's raw votes or, and really, apportionment for congressional districts in the future.
So this is all about political power.
When you think about the U.S. Census, the left was successful in keeping the U.S. citizenship question off of the census during the Trump administration.
And so what that means is anyone who is here will be counted in the census, and those numbers will be used for congressional apportionment.
Now, only U.S. citizens can vote.
And yet, you would have green card holders all the way down to illegal aliens who would be counted towards congressional districts, which means California would have more congressional representatives than they should, and other states would lose congressional representation based on this scheme.
It seems a little short-sighted if people are coming in who are genuinely as dangerous as you say.
And obviously, I don't see any reason why they wouldn't.
Why wouldn't people who want to attack us come in?
Ultimately, there's going to be an attack on our country, and the reporting is going to have to say that these are illegal immigrants who snuck in, who came in under the Biden administration.
Isn't that going to be some kind of political drawback for them?
Yes.
And frankly, this administration is running on dumb luck that it hasn't already happened.
And I think their luck's going to run out.
And this was made all the more clear after attacks in Israel and when you had Hamas leaders calling for violence all over the world, including in the U.S.
And so tensions are running very high, and we need to act like there are terror threats in the U.S. and preemptively find these people and detain them.
So I don't want to sound overly naive, but people keep asking me this question, and I don't actually know the answer to it.
You know, during the Obama administration, Dinesh D'Souza wrote an article about Obama's anti-colonial bias, his anti-colonial philosophy that he had inherited from his father, and basically that he thought America was an unfair country, that the fact that it even existed was in some degree unfair.
How much is that kind of ideology influencing the people in charge?
In other words, to say, well, this is political gain, that's something I can understand, at least.
That's a cynical, straightforward idea.
But is there underneath that, in the people who in power, an ideology that this is only as fair that people should be able to come into our country?
Yes, both are at play.
And many of the staff in the Biden administration are the same staff that were in the Obama administration.
people say this is Obama's third term.
That's pretty accurate.
And so we've got Marxists leading this country now and they absolutely believe that, that it is, you know, America lasts and America is not a great country and therefore we should not have things and be better than other countries and therefore we should allow migrants from all over the world to come in.
You know, that says something about why if socialism is so great, you know, why should we be letting people come in from socialist countries?
You know, why isn't socialism great there too?
Anyway, it's not logical, but that's what we're dealing with.
It is kind of frightening that you say that when they keep lying.
I mean, at no point do they ever come out and say, look, this is our philosophy.
You know, we feel that this should be done.
So they know that this is not something that people want.
And yet it just keeps happening.
Is there any point when, I mean, for instance, in New York now, I just got back from New York.
The place is swarming with illegals.
They're putting them on islands out in the harbor.
They're putting them in hotels.
The hotels love it because they're full every night, but it means that ordinary tourists have no place to go.
Surely at some point there's a political price to pay for this, even for the Democrats.
Well, that's why Biden is asking for more money, and it's to pay off those cities and the mayors to continue housing these illegal aliens and to stop complaining about it.
We've got sanctuary mayors like Adams in New York City and Governor Hochl also from New York and some other mayors and governors around the country saying we can't keep taking these masses of people.
Now, they never say, well, this isn't good policy.
We're going to stop being a sanctuary jurisdiction.
They just say we need the federal government's help.
Translation, they want more federal money to continue to put these people up in hotels, to send them out to the suburbs, et cetera, et cetera.
And Americans are fed up.
Plenty of New Yorkers have expressed their outrage with this, shouting down Ocasio-Cortez or Congressman Jerry Nadler about this.
Same thing on the south side of Chicago.
Chicagoans are having none of it with their new mayor who's all bought into this taking in more migrants.
And those on the south side of Chicago are saying, what are you doing to us?
We didn't have enough housing to begin with.
We're competing for jobs.
You're taking over our schools and our recreation centers.
And so we need more Americans to speak up like that all over the country.
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So we're talking to Laura Reese, the director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation.
But formerly you were Deputy Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security.
Was that during the Trump administration?
Yes, it was.
So what was the plan then?
What was the policy that you were trying to implement at that point?
It was to uphold the law and to apply consequences to illegal immigration and to combat the fraud.
And so we implemented, for example, what's known as the Remain in Mexico program.
This was something, a law that Congress had passed back in 1996, but it had never been used before.
And prior to the Trump administration implementing it, we had what we're seeing now again, which is people come to the border.
They're coached to say a few words of fear to get over a very low hurdle of a credible fear standard.
And then they are released into the U.S. where they disappear and may or may not eventually apply for asylum.
So with the Remain in Mexico program, we said, okay, you can apply for asylum, but you're not coming into the U.S. to do it.
You're going to remain in Mexico.
And when your court date comes up, we will bring you into the U.S. You'll appear before an immigration judge.
And when your hearing's over, you'll go back to Mexico.
And so what happened was the caravans of illegal aliens that we had been seeing previously stopped because future illegal aliens learned I can no longer say a few words of fear as a golden ticket to get into the U.S. and disappear.
And so they stopped coming.
So you're trying to implement these policies under Trump.
And obviously the Democrats are pushing back.
Obviously the media is pushing back.
But what about what they call the deep state?
I mean, what about the permanent government?
Were you having trouble implementing these policies just institutionally?
Yeah, the swamp is deep and it is real.
And so there were plenty of staff within DHS, which had sadly become a very large bureaucracy very quickly.
The Justice Department, the State Department, Health and Human Services, that would slow roll regulations that we were trying to implement.
And every rule that was published was immediately sued by numerous groups on the left.
So lawfare was a key tactic by the left, and it would tie up things in court.
And unfortunately, they were still in court by the time Joe Biden came into office.
And so, you know, on day one, he stopped many of the very successful programs to maintain border security and to enforce the laws.
And for those cases that were still in court, he had his Justice Department withdraw from those cases or say, you know, we don't, this is no longer an issue for us.
If there were to be a Republican administration after this, whether it's Trump or anybody else, where would you start to fix this?
Well, you've got to steal the border just day one.
And so that means re-implementing Remain in Mexico.
That does take time because you do have to do negotiations with other countries.
Re-implementing what's generally called safe third country concept, which is if you're going to travel to the U.S. and then claim asylum after traversing multiple safe countries through which you didn't claim asylum, we're going to send you back to that first safe country and you can apply for asylum there.
It's applying consequences.
Also, the immigration statute says that anyone coming in here illegally is supposed to be detained.
And so using the detention tool also, Secretary Mayorkas of Homeland Security has completely neutered immigration and customs enforcement.
His enforcement priorities memo has told ICE to not arrest, not investigate, not detain, and certainly not deport, but rather, and nor to prosecute, but to simply let these people in and more to do social services.
So unfortunately, many have called to either defund ICE or abolish ICE, similar to defund the police that we've heard for many years.
And the Biden administration is doing the same.
It's basically turning ICE into a social services agency instead of a law enforcement agency.
Is there any use in penalizing employers for hiring illegals, or is that no longer an issue?
Are we so overwhelmed that it doesn't matter?
Well, there's certainly a use for it, and no, it's not being done.
Basically, illegal aliens want five things.
They want to enter the U.S.
They want to stay here.
They want to work here.
They want to send money home and they want to bring family here.
It is still against the law to work in the U.S. without authorization and to employ such people, but it's simply not enforced.
And it needs to be.
And that's probably one of the more the quickest ways to get aliens to self-deport.
If they can't find work here, then they're not going to be able to send money home or to bring their family here.
And so it is an effective tool.
And this goes back to the late Barbara Jordan, a member in Congress from Texas, a Democrat, who said work in the U.S. is the number one pull factor.
And so if you take that off the table, you'd see a big difference.
Is there any chance at any point that these people will be deported again?
It seems like there's so many of them that it would be such a massive operation.
Is that just a hopeless idea?
Well, we need to get very comfortable with the idea of mass deportations.
You don't need to deport every single illegal alien.
You don't need to deport several million of them.
But once aliens see that there are consequences to illegal immigration, then their calculation changes, their risk changes, and they will then behave accordingly.
If they can't work here and if they can't send money home, and if they're going to be detained, then they may decide to go elsewhere.
And then you are also sending a message south of the border and around the world.
Don't bother coming here illegally.
You won't get in.
You'll be detained.
You won't be able to work, et cetera, et cetera.
And then they stop coming.
There are arguments on the right against securing the border, against at least tightening the border.
The Wall Street Journal, basically, for instance, will not allow an op-ed decrying the situation at the border.
I mean, the Wall Street Journal, I think they're still thinking about cheap laborers.
I have no idea, actually, what their argument is.
But even, you know, the Cato Institute is frequently saying that, no, these people actually are aiding the country, aiding doing jobs that natives won't do and restoring population, which is falling off.
Do you find any kind of sense in, you know, let me put it this way.
What border policy would you like to see?
Do you think it's time to just shut the thing down?
Or are there reasons to bring people in?
Right now, we need to seal the border because we have serious national security threats and we have to address that.
But in terms of lawful immigration, as long as it's easier and faster to come here illegally than it is to come legally, then rational human beings will make that calculation and act accordingly.
If we have a lawful and an orderly and a manageable immigration system annually, then that equation changes.
So right now on our lawful side of the equation, we give more green cards based on family relations than we do based on labor.
And so that calculation, that ratio should change based on market need.
And we need to get back to the nuclear family and get away from the chain migration that we've experienced for decades.
We also need to end birthright citizenship, which says even if you just cross the border five minutes ago as an illegal alien and have a child on U.S. soil, that child's a U.S. citizen, for whom all sorts of economic benefits, social services attach to that child, really the parents who are here illegally, that's a problem.
That is a huge pull factor.
And so that needs to be ended because those people don't have ties to the U.S.
So we need to get back to what or get to what most of the world is like, which is your citizenship is based on your parents' citizenship.
So those key changes need to be met.
But for those who say, well, the border should be open because it's cheap labor or market need, would any number be too much for them?
I have to ask.
Is there anyone they are willing to argue should not be here?
And presuming everyone can agree we wouldn't want terrorists here, that means you have to draw a line somewhere.
And so you can argue about where to draw that line.
But we are in chaos at the moment, our border and our interior.
And this is no way for a sovereign nation to operate.
What about the problem of drugs coming into the country?
I keep hearing about this, but I'm not sure I understand the mechanics of that.
Cartels Control at the Border00:07:53
Why is it easier to bring drugs into the country if you're still being processed, if people are still being processed at the border, why is fentanyl such a problem there?
Well, it's a few things.
Because the Biden administration has instructed border agents to process aliens into the country, those agents are tied up dealing with the masses of people standing in front of them and doing the paperwork.
That pulls them off the line.
They are not actually securing the border, which opens up all sorts of terrain for drug smugglers to cross unimpeded into the U.S.
And again, we've got the 1.5 million known gotaways.
Many of them are smuggling drugs.
There are, interestingly, game cameras set up on whether it's ranchers land or what have you that capture photographs day and night, basically military aged men dressed in head-to-toe camouflage, carrying very full backpacks every single day and night.
And so the drugs are getting in with ease.
And the fentanyl, I mean, that is, we're talking the equivalent of three grains of salt can kill a person of fentanyl.
And so it is extremely dangerous.
And it is poisoning our young people because it's been laced into other drugs that people don't realize they're taking it.
And we're losing 70,000 Americans just from opioids, mostly fentanyl, record highs.
How are the cartels reacting to this?
I mean, we've been almost at, you know, the cartels virtually run Mexico at this point, and they seem to be making incursions.
Are they establishing a beachhead in our southern states?
Yes, the cartels have operational control of our southern border and sometimes even some of our land.
There's a small island in Texas that tends to go back and forth between Texas Department of Public Safety, National Guard, and the cartels.
They have also, the cartels have also established a foothold throughout the U.S. to complete their smuggling chain of both drugs, but also people and trafficking.
We haven't even talked about unaccompanied children yet and the sex trafficking that results from that.
Well, let's talk about that.
I mean, just before we do, though, when you say operational control, what exactly does that look like?
No one's crossing that border without going through a cartel.
And that's the extent of their control.
And they are making billions.
Biden is their best friend business-wise because they're just making hand-over-fist money.
And now about the human trafficking.
You know, I have heard that we are one of the major recipients of enslaved children.
Is that a fair statement?
Yes, that's been reported.
If your audience has seen the movie Sound of Freedom, that's based on the former DHS agent Tim Ballard, and he has said that, and other people associated with that movie have reported that.
And what people need to understand is about unaccompanied alien children.
And this is something sadly that was designed by the left.
In particular, Senator Diane Feinstein and Representative Zoe Lofgren introduced legislation back in 2000 to protect unaccompanied alien children.
But what it did was it enticed more parents to send their kids unaccompanied across the border because the legislation gives all sorts of immigration benefits to unaccompanied alien children.
Now, initially it didn't pass in Congress.
It took several attempts.
But in 2008, it was folded into the Trafficking Victims Reauthorization Act, and it passed.
And you can look at the statistics of the number of unaccompanied children from that date, 2008 to now, and it is a steep increase.
And like so many records that President Biden has made regarding the border, all of them bad records, the number of unaccompanied children is another one where it's over 400,000 unaccompanied children that have come across the border under Biden.
And so once here, then if their parents are south of the border, they view this as the child getting a foothold in the U.S.
And then subsequently, they would be able to reunify with them in the U.S., which the Biden administration is happily implementing.
In other cases, a parent might already be in the U.S. and then they're having their child join them, putting their child in cartels' hands, some of the most brutal people on the planet.
And so this is extremely inhumane, despite Maorkis repeating that his border policies are safe, lawful, and humane.
And then these children, I mean, once they get into the U.S., their lives don't necessarily improve because, yes, they are being subjected to sex trafficking as well as child labor.
And, you know, even the administration realizes they are vulnerable on this issue, the child labor issue.
And so they've tried to sweeten the supplemental money they're requesting by investigating child labor violations.
My last question, I'm not even sure how to phrase this question, but you worked within the administration.
You worked within the system.
Some of the things you're telling me are so awful, you know, so terrible for our country, so terrible for the people coming over, so terrible for the people who already live here.
Are there no voices within the Democrat Party, no voices within the deep state that understand the brutality of this, that understand the cruelty of it?
You know, is that a naive question?
Is there no one who sees through the ideology to the truth?
It's not a naive question.
It's something that I struggle with.
How can people keep working in these agencies and do this?
You know, behind closed doors, even Democrats will admit that the Biden administration has done a terrible job with respect to the border and just lost control.
Unfortunately, they won't say it in public.
The Biden administration has been very effective at keeping a media blackout on this.
The media won't cover it.
Too few journalists, citizen journalists, go down to the border or south of the border and will record video of it.
And the few times that the mainstream media shows up, think Martha's Vineyard, when Governor DeSantis sent a few up there, when the mainstream media shows up, then it becomes an optics problem for the Biden administration, and they will quickly clamp down.
So in the case of Martha's Vineyard, the illegal aliens that were there, they were deported off that island within 48 hours.
So thus far, the administration has tried to and been pretty successful at keeping a lid on most of this, and they just keep gaslighting it.
Mainstream Media's Role in Border Coverage00:00:34
As you talked about earlier, Karine Jean-Pierre at the podium saying the border's secure.
It's remarkable.
Laura Rees, the director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation, thank you very much for coming on.
You've depressed me terribly, but I do appreciate this straight talk.
I hope to talk to you again.
Thank you.
Thank you, Andrew.
All right.
Once again, Laura Rees, the director of Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation.
If you want to be cheered up after that depressing interview, come on Friday to the Andrew Clavin Show.
We'll probably still be depressing, but at least we'll be hilarious.