Even border Democrats are frustrated with the Biden administration's poor immigration policies, as Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, continues his rebuke of the new regime, saying it is sending a "bad message."
"First of all, within one week of the inauguration, I was calling the White House already, and saying, 'Hey, see what's happening on the ground,'" Cuellar told MSNBC's "MTP Daily" with Chuck Todd on Wednesday. "This was back in January. I was telling the White House folks, 'You've got to understand what I'm seeing here. I'm seeing the numbers.'
"Because I live at the border. I don't just visit the border; I live there. I go there right after my votes in D.C., and so I've been warning the administration."
The administration is not only not listening, but it is sending the wrong message to migrants and making a bad crisis worse, Cuellar added.
Earlier in the week Cuellar blasted Biden for sending a delegation to the border, and not going to see the crisis for himself, reports the NY Post.
"The administration's message has to be better," he told host Todd. "You can't say, 'Don't come now, come later.' That's a bad message. It's got to be clear and concise: 'Don't come in here illegally.' That should be the message."
Instead, the Biden administration has sought to unwind the policies of the Trump administration that had frequently sent that "clear and concise" message.
"Message number two is what I call the networks of friend and family," Cuellar continued. "'Hey, Pedro, I was able to come over; you ought to come over.' They see images like what you're playing right now: People coming across. So, of course, they're going to come in."
And, finally, Cuellar said the administration needs to cut off the migrant trafficking of humans, children, and drugs.
"Third message, real quickly, the criminal organizations: That is a powerful message because they charge an average of $6,000," he said, referring to the criminal enterprise of drug cartels and human traffickers. "Imagine if we had 100,000 people that crossed in February, do the math. That's $600 million that they made.
"So they got an incentive to recruit aggressively. I just got off the phone with somebody in Mexico, and they went over some things. It's exactly what I'm telling you. We have to cut off the money that's going to the drug cartels. Otherwise, we feed them and feed them and we feed them."
President Joe Biden is not the only one failing on border security either, Cuellar said, pointing to a divided Congress that politicizes the issues from both sides of the "push" and "pull."
"We have to make sure that we understand, the pull and push factors," Cuellar concluded. "If you have somebody on your show, you can tell who is a Democrat and who is a Republican. Democrats talk about the push factors only. Republicans talk only about the pull factors.
"We have to address both of them. Both of the factors."