The U.S. southern border "humiliation" is a "pathetic" failure by President Joe Biden, said Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis who vowed on Newsmax to develop "rules for engagement" to allow the "use of force" on Mexican drug cartels.
"We're going to have rules of engagement on the border," DeSantis said Thursday on "The Chris Salcedo Show." "If the cartels are cutting through our border wall to try to move product, that's going to be the last thing they do, because they're going to end up stone cold dead.
"We are going to use force at the border to be able to defend the American people."
Using the military against the Mexican drug cartels is one piece of DeSantis' border plan, which includes building the wall to "reestablish the sovereignty of this country," ending the allowance of "bogus asylum claims to overrule our border," and "empowering states on immigration enforcement."
"And we are going to lean in against the cartels directly, not just in terms of what they're doing on the ground, but also interdicting the precursor chemicals to fentanyl that are being brought in by sea from China into these Mexican ports," DeSantis told host Chris Salcedo. "So I think it requires an all-hands-on-deck approach."
Biden has humiliated the U.S. worldwide with his "pathetic" border failures, DeSantis said.
"At the end of the day, the thing that I saw down there that stuck with me was just the humiliation that as an American, we don't even have control over our own country," DeSantis said.
"We've ceded our border to Mexican drug cartels. That is pathetic. And that is not what the American people want."
DeSantis says declaring a national emergency on the border is a Day One priority.
"On Day One, as president, I will declare a national emergency," DeSantis said. "We'll mobilize all available resources, including the military, to stop the invasion at the southern border.
"Yes, we will construct the border wall, because I think that that's important to have.
"But we're going to reestablish the sovereignty of this country. We are not going to allow bogus asylum claims to overrun our border like it's happened under Biden."
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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