Rep. Adam Kinzinger Tuesday rejected an argument comparing President Donald Trump's emergency border order to executive actions taken by former President Barack Obama on gun control or immigration, saying they are not the same thing.
"You can't change a law on guns or immigration with the stroke of a pen," the Illinois Republican told CNN Newsroom anchor Jim Scuitto, after he asked the lawmaker why he criticized Obama's orders in the past but backs Trump's now. "If somebody was trying to change a law, that would be a very different situation than a president saying, 'I'm declaring a national emergency on the border.'"
Trump, through his order, is not appropriating money "out of thin air," Kinzinger added, but instead, he's switching resources from the Department of Defense's counterdrug operations to fight drugs coming across the border.
Kinzinger, who served a tour of duty in February at the border in Arizona with the Air National Guard, said being at the border solidified his support for Trump's declaration.
He noted that it was his fourth deployment to the border, but the first time following "coyotes," or the guards paid by drug cartels to move either drugs or humans across the border.
"What I saw, if we saw somebody and they heard a helicopter or they thought they were going to be pursued, they would drop these big bundles," Kinzinger, a lieutenant colonel and pilot, told Scuitto. You would see these coyotes abandon a group (of people) and leave them out in the middle of a desert where there's no life for 50 miles from there...so I came back and said, because of the drugs and human trafficking, I support it."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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