Rep. Tenney to Newsmax: Detainee's Arrest in NY Jacket Shows Migration Dangers

The Border Patrol's arrest in Yuma, Arizona, of a migrant from Saudi Arabia who was wearing a jacket from the Central Oneida County Volunteer Ambulance Corps from upstate New York shows how easy it is for people entering the country illegally to get around from state to state, Rep. Claudia Tenney said on Newsmax Thursday.

"What it is showing you is how transient and how easy it is to move around this country, to get in and out, to get from one side of the country to New York and pick up that patch somehow," the New York Republican, whose home county is Oneida, told Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "It's not something good to find. It's obscure."

Photos posted on Twitter by the Border Patrol show the 21-year-old man wearing the COCVAC patch on a squad jacket, but Chief Thomas Meyers said the man isn't a member of the ambulance corps, reports WKTV in Utica, New York.

The chief said that by policy, jackets and other gear are returned to the department when someone leaves. The style of the jacket the detainee was wearing was retired in 2017, and Meyers said that the garment could have ended up in a donation bin.

The detainee is from Saudi Arabia and was said by a Border Patrol official on Twitter to have ties with "several Yemeni subjects of interest," reports WKTV. The post is no longer showing on the official's site.

Tenney told Newsmax that there have been numerous people on the terror watch list, who have come across the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, and that the Border Patrol told her when she visited last spring that migrants from more than 37 countries have been stopped while trying to enter the United States.

"This is a port of entry into the United States where you can just walk across totally unsafe," said Tenney. "It's dangerous because you see suspected terrorists coming in, like this guy who's probably been to my community and picked up that patch somewhere. He's gotten around the world back to Yemen, where he has contacts with known terrorist groups, and back across the southern border, posturing as an innocent ambulance core person from my region trying to fool people."

She added that in addition to potential terrorists entering the country, there are also people with diseases, including COVID-19, coming in, as well as an increased amount of dangerous narcotics, such as fentanyl.

The dangers point to the importance of continuing to build the border wall, but President Joe Biden issued an executive order to stop its construction.

"Every single day, the American taxpayers are spending millions of dollars for that contract that lapsed," she said, adding that a wall wouldn't completely stop people from coming into the United States, but slows them down so they could be dealt with.

"It's a humanitarian problem that Joe Biden refuses to deal with," said Tenney. "Our vice president, who has been assigned this task, I called for her to be removed from this."

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