Border ‘at breaking point’: GOP
House Speaker Mike Johnson led 64 fellow Republicans on a visit to the southern border Wednesday to amplify their call for a crackdown on illegal immigration.
Speaking in Eagle Pass, Texas, Johnson (La.) told reporters the nation’s increasingly porous perimeter has empowered cartels, imperiled migrants and left the country vulnerable to terrorist infiltration.
“One thing is absolutely clear,” he said. “America is at a breaking point with record levels of illegal immigration.”
Johnson squarely blamed President Biden and Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas for record-breaking rates of illegal border crossers, calling the situation a “catastrophe.”
“The situation here and in other parts of the country is truly unconscionable,” Johnson said after visiting migrant processing centers and conferring with residents and law-enforcement officials.
Johnson and other members of the delegation stressed the central role of cartels in the border ecosystem, asserting that their human and drug smuggling were thriving.
Johnson alluded to a Republican threat to scuttle additional Ukraine aid if the migrant crisis went unaddressed, saying: “If President Biden wants a supplemental spending bill focused on national security, it better begin by defending America’s national security.”
For Johnson, the House GOP’s immigration bill that passed in May “is the necessary ingredient” for his caucus to consider the deal in the works on the Senate side, he told CNN.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (Ohio) also denounced Biden.
As he spoke, a migrant family with three children dashed across the Rio Grande and into the US.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre sought to pin border dysfunction on Johnson.
“You have Speaker Johnson who . . . continues to . . . move forward with political stunts and has blocked any efforts from the president to deal with the border,” she said.