Senator: Brazilian immigrants are ‘wearing designer clothes and Gucci’
South Carolina’s Graham assails Biden policies at Mexican border
Sen. Lindsey Graham, an outspoken critic of President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, said affluent Brazilians were illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and heading to Connecticut “wearing designer clothes and Gucci bags.”
In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday, Graham, R-S.C., was critical of the administration’s order to halt large-scale immigration arrests at job sites, with plans for a new approach to target employers who pay substandard wages and engage in exploitative labor practices.
“Now, what [Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas did today, calling off all the raids of worksite, is going to be another incentive for people to come, because the word is out. You come, you claim asylum, you never leave. The policy choices of Biden are all over the world now,” Graham said.
The senator, who recently visited the border in Arizona, added: “We had 40,000 Brazilians come through the Yuma Sector alone headed for Connecticut wearing designer clothes and Gucci bags. This is not economic migration anymore.”
“People see an open America,” he continued. “They’re taking advantage of us. And it won’t be long before a terrorist gets in this crowd.”
Kevin Bishop, a spokesman for Graham, defended the senator’s comments, citing what he saw during his recent trip to the border and news reports about Brazilian immigrants. Bishop also provided photographs of luggage and shoes taken at the border.
“They have had thousands of Brazilians coming through there,” Bishop said. “As Senator Graham noted in Yuma, the luggage was nicer than his own.”
None of the luggage in the photos provided to The Washington Post appeared to be Gucci. The most obvious clothing in the photos was a pair of fairly clean Puma tennis shoes without shoelaces.
“We saw luggage and attire that’s highly unusual for someone who would be supposedly traveling through the desert on a long journey into the U.S.,” Bishop said. “No dust or mud on them. But they do have luggage with the airline bag check attached.”
Graham was referencing a report from the Yuma County sheriff that 3,400 migrants — mostly from Brazil, Venezuela and Cuba — spent the weekend in Border Patrol holding facilities in Yuma.
Record numbers of Brazilians have been arrested at the southern U.S. border this year, according to Customs and Border Protection data. During the first 11 months of fiscal 2021, more than 46,200 Brazilians were apprehended. The number for all of 2019 was just below 17,900. Brazilians are now the No. 6 most-detained nationality.
The Brazilians are believed to be a part of a larger wave of Latin American migrants fleeing a region still struggling to get control of the coronavirus pandemic and high unemployment who are hoping for a more lenient response from the White House than they would have received under President Donald Trump. Brazilian migration to the United States has increased significantly since 2018, when right-wing politician Jair Bolsonaro was elected president.
If the migrants were from Mexico or the countries in the Northern Triangle — Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — they would be released immediately, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement is deciding to release these individuals coming from other countries after the Border Patrol processes them and turns them over.