Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem told Newsmax on Wednesday that Mexican drug cartels have set up shop on tribal reservations in her state because they know the federal government has jurisdiction over those lands, and that the Biden administration is "letting it happen."
"Even though South Dakota isn't a neighboring state to Texas, we're on the front lines of this thing," Noem said on "Eric Bolling The Balance." "I've got nine Native American tribes, and the cartels are set up on our tribal grounds. They are facilitating this drug trafficking, this human trafficking through my tribal grounds here in South Dakota because I don't have jurisdiction there.
"The Department of Justice and the federal government have jurisdiction on our reservations. I don't as a state, so [the cartels are] using these areas of federal lands as havens for their criminal activity. Every single state literally is a border state because we've got these cartels throughout the country in protected areas, and Joe Biden is letting it happen."
The Supreme Court ruled last week that Customs and Border Patrol agents are allowed to take down razor wire that was installed by the Texas National Guard to stop illegal immigration. The Biden administration argued that the federal government is responsible for border security.
Noem visited the southern border in Texas on Friday, where she took a boat tour with the Texas Department of Public Safety, met with the Texas National Guard and state troopers, and was briefed by Border Patrol agents.
"Talking to the Texas National Guard when I was down there, they said the reason that the federal government took them to court was because the razor wire they were putting up was actually working," Noem said. "They had put it up on top of shipping containers on a panel in a different method that actually kept off even the able-bodied military-aged men to climb and cross over it. You could see everywhere they had installed this new way of putting this barrier in place. It worked, and that's when the federal government decided to take them to court and sue them to have to take it down.
"That's what's incredible to me. We have a president that's not just ignoring federal law, he's knowingly violating federal law and helping and facilitating this invasion."
Noem, whose second book, "No Going Back: The Truth on What's Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward," will be available in May, said even Border Patrol agents don't like the way the Biden administration is managing the crisis.
"What's sad to me is the Border Patrol agents, they don't want to do what this president is doing," Noem said. "They're good people who have been in these positions for many, many years. They've lived in these communities, and they hate what they're seeing as the destruction to their town, their city, their community, and their country.
"I don't know of anybody that supports the president's policies except for him and his White House affiliates. You look at those who work within ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], those who work within Border Patrol, and even many of these Democrat mayors don't like dealing with the consequences of this illegal invasion that we've got going on."
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Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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