Republicans should be putting pressure on President Joe Biden to visit the U.S.-Mexico border just as they did Vice President Kamala Harris, Rep. Jodey Arrington told Newsmax, though he acknowledged it's unlikely to change White House policy.
"I don't believe it's going to change his posture," the Texas Republican said Thursday on "Spicer & Co." Still, the lawmaker said: "We need to continue to hold him accountable. We need to continue to push back. We need to continue to reveal the disaster and the chaos that that is ensuing directly as a result of his policies."
Nevertheless, Arrington told hosts Sean Spicer and Lyndsay Keith that Biden "is placating the left every day on just about every policy, and I don't see his open borders [policy] — or Kamala Harris' — changing either."
Both were clear during the 2020 campaign that they were "for decriminalizing illegal crossing, giving these folks free health care," he said. "They've abandoned their first job of securing our sovereign border and protecting our citizens."
Biden has created a "constitutional crisis," among other crises, in not "faithfully executing the laws of the land," Arrington said. "The only hope, the only way out of this, is for states to exercise their sovereign power to shut the border down, prosecute the bad guys, deport people [and] actually enforce Title 42 in its full extent to protect us from another resurgence of COVID."
The Title 42 order allows rapid expulsion of immigrants who would otherwise be held in crowded facilities and might transmit COVID-19 due to the inability to have them socially distanced.
Arrington said the only way to end the crisis is for leaders of border states to "step up and not act as helpless victims, but do the job that the federal government won't do and this administration won't do."
Migrants are being flown into Abilene, Texas, in his congressional district, from detention centers all over the country, he said.
"We have one just up the road, but this is the disconcerting part. ... Some of these folks have COVID, they know they're testing COVID-positive. Some of them are criminals. They say they're not violent criminals, but the fact is, they can't do the criminal history check from their country of origin," Arrington said.
Often, he said, officials don't even know where the migrants are from, so it's difficult to follow up.
"Nobody's going to monitor, and to say that it undermines the safety and security of my people in west Texas and the American people more broadly, is the biggest understatement of the year."
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