The Biden administration says it's taking steps to streamline legal immigration, including tightening asylum against people who try to enter the country before asking for refuge in a third country, and GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley on Sunday said she's surprised it took President Joe Biden "so long" to act.
"If you look at the fact that it wasn't broken to start with, they broke it," Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and South Carolina governor, commented on CBS' "Face the Nation."
"You ask Border Patrol what they do and they [say] We're glorified babysitters," she added. "We need to let them do their job.
"We've got to enforce some things. And we should do what I did when I was governor, which was to pass one of the toughest immigration laws in the country and do a mandatory e-verify program that says no businesses can hire anyone that's in this country illegally."
She added that the border crisis was created by both Republicans and Democrats and "should have been dealt with a long time ago and it wasn't."
"What I would do is, first of all, do the mandatory e-verify," said Haley. "I would defund sanctuary cities. I would go back to 'Remain in Mexico' because no one wants to remain in Mexico.
"I would fire the 87,000 IRS agents that are going after Middle America and put 25,000 Border Patrol and ICE agents on the ground. And instead of catch and release, let's go to catch and deport."
The United States, she added, always wants to take care of those who have been persecuted, but still must take care of Americans first.
"We've got to start looking at the fact that every state's a border state, that we've had enough fentanyl cross the border that would kill every single American," said Haley. "The No. 1 cause of death for adults 18 to 49 is fentanyl.
"Why don't we focus on that first? We can't take care of anybody else if we can't take care of ourselves."
She also called on completing immigration reform efforts before allowing more people into the country, but said there are still legal immigration methods that need to be kept in focus.
Haley also spoke out against the separation of migrant children from their families, but also said that "we shouldn't be taking families that we don't have any control over."
"No one wants to be inhumane about this," she said. "I saw when I was at the United Nations what happens to these people who are trafficked. I mean, if a child loses a shoe, they just leave the child there. If a person gets sick, they leave them to die."
Haley also spoke about the issue of abortion, after having signed a 20-week law in 2016, when she was still governor in South Carolina.
"I don't want unelected justices to be deciding something this personal," said Haley. "I have long said I am pro-life not because the Republican Party tells me to be, but because my husband was adopted."
But she said she does think they need to make sure that people's voices are heard and that "we need to do this humanizing standpoint and not a demonizing standpoint, which is done in the past."
But there will be no national law on abortion if there are not 60 votes in the Senate, and neither side is close to that, so "why try to divide people further?" asked Haley. "Why not talk about the fact that we should be trying to save as many babies as possible and support as many mothers as possible?"
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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