The Biden administration is "generating" the number of border encounters to "spin and obfuscate" the dire situation, says Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Thursday claimed border encounters with individuals from "targeted countries" had "dropped significantly" over the past two weeks, citing actions taken by the agency to combat the issue.
"I'm not buying what he's selling," Fallon told Newsmax's "Spicer & Co." on Thursday.
"This is ridiculous. The numbers, the data don't lie. They're generating them. Think about April 2022 — we had 234,000 illegal border crossings. You compare it to the last April President Donald Trump was in office.
"It was 1234% worse. May was 240,000 illegal border crossings, which was 930% worse than the last May President Trump was in office.
"What Mayorkas is trying to do is spin and obfuscate. What's shocking is this is a global problem now, a global catastrophe because for the first time in our history as well, the number of folks crossing the border that were not from Mexico and Nicaragua or Mexico and Honduras — those two countries don't make the majority, it's everybody else.
"One hundred and sixty different countries have people crossing the border illegally right now and it has to be stopped."
Fallon said the border issue is "number one" in terms of priority, even above the classified document controversy with President Joe Biden.
"With the border, what we've seen is 250,000 illegal border crossings in December — that's the worst ever on record. In fact, we had never had a month where we had over 200,000 illegal border crossings in our history.
"The last 10 months in a row have been that bad, so clearly it's a de facto open border at this point. And we must secure it because right now we're ceding control to the Mexican drug cartels."
On the discovery of classified documents in Biden's residence and Washington, D.C., think tank office, Fallon said the big difference versus Trump's handling of sensitive documents was that Biden was not president until 2021, "so he did not have the power and the authority to declassify them ,whereas President Trump and other presidents do unless they deal with a nuclear secret."
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Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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