Arizona Rep. David Schweikert is demanding that President Barack Obama deploy at least 10,000 members of the U.S. National Guard to his state and any other that is being flooded by the wave of unaccompanied minors crossing American borders.
Schweikert, a Republican, appeared Friday on "America's Forum" on
Newsmax TV to discuss what he says is the administration's lackluster response to the problem and the 2014 Southwest Border Protection Act.
"I have no idea how this president looks himself in the mirror in the morning considering how duplicitous their promises, their speeches," he told host J.D. Hayworth. "Back in January, we knew something was happening. This administration pretended nothing, avoided it, and didn't want to talk about it."
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Earlier in the week, Schweikert penned a
tersely worded letter to the president, demanding the immediate deployment of the National Guard to any border state that requests it. The National Guard would serve as support for U.S. Customs and Border Protection until "we have obtained control of our southern border."
"Thanks to your administration's failure to enforce United States immigration law, our Customs and Border Patrol agents are being overwhelmed by the current surge in illegal immigration," he wrote, explaining that the "drastic increase and persistent number of unaccompanied minor children" has diverted resources to the point that it's "causing a potentially devastating impact on our national security."
"Arizona Border Patrol agents are telling us that some of their best trackers, some of their best folks, are now providing social services at the detention facilities to children," Schweikert said. "We need to shore up our border presence."
Schweikert said word of Obama's lax enforcement of immigration policy has spread to Central and South America, the home of the thousands of children who are showing up at U.S. borders in record numbers.
"We're being told that you can pick up a newspaper in El Salvador and literally see printed advertisements from coyotes saying get across the U.S. border and you can become an anchor and be able to bring the rest of your family," he explained. "Are you telling me that our embassies, our consultants in Central America, don't read the local papers?"
Stopping the immediate influx is only a "small portion of the solution," he said, adding the narrative needs to be changed to let immigrants know they will not be allowed to stay if they show up here.
"We're going to lose our sovereignty unless we can demonstrate that our border means something," he said.
The congressman pointed to data released this week projecting more than 120,000 unaccompanied minors are expected to arrive at U.S. borders in the next year. Just between October and May, there were 47,000.
The message that if children can enter the United States they can become the anchor for the rest of the family needs to be snuffed out, said Schweikert, who blamed Obama for changing national policy "with his pen and telephone."
"It's a law of obvious consequences," he said. "What do you think is going to happen?
"We're going to have to rewrite a substantial portion of our immigration law so that we can never have a president again who can just make the rules up as they go."
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