The numbers of immigrants arriving daily at the United State's border definitely point to a crisis situation, former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Thursday.
"By any measure, 4,000 arrests in a day, 100,000 in a month ― that's the population of the city of Albany, New York ― that suddenly shows up on our southern border in one month is a crisis," Johnson told Fox News' "Fox & Friends." "It's a crisis because it overwhelms our Border Patrol and our immigration officials' ability to deal with it, and it's a crisis because you have to absorb that population somehow into southern border towns."
Johnson added the crisis has been going on for some time, and emanates from Central America, "the most violent region of our world right now," and needs to be addressed at the source.
"A lot of people don't want to hear that," he said. "They want quick, easy answers. They want some legal lever to pull . . . we have got make the long-term investment in addressing the poverty and violence in those nations. It can be done."
However, it would take a "sustained political commitment" through several administrations rather than an immediate solution, Johnson warned.
Johnson added, while he was serving under then-President Barack Obama in 2014, there was a similar, but smaller crisis, and numbers were brought down by getting out the message that the journey to the U.S. border was dangerous, immigrants knew they were not eligible for DACA, and Mexico was urged to help at its southern border.
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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