South Carolina Gov. McMaster Vows Fight Against Accepting Migrant Children

Gov. Henry McMaster, R-S.C., said Thursday he's rejecting a call from the federal government to allow unaccompanied migrant children to be housed through his state's already crowded foster home system, and if the Biden administration tries to circumvent him, it will have a "fight" on its hands. 

"We got inquiries a couple of weeks ago or more from the Biden administration asking how much space we had as our foster homes and, of course, our foster homes are full," McMaster said on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "We have about 4,000 children in there and don't have room for all of them."

But even if a vacancy pops up, South Carolina does not have room for children from another state, "much less another country," McMaster said, "particularly when the flow of those children and others could be stopped just by building the wall and doing the things that the Trump administration was doing on the Mexican border."

McMaster added that other governors around the nation will also push back against accepting migrant children into their foster systems, and that the situation at the nation's southern border is not the fault of the people of his state.

"This was made by errors, misjudgments, and a bad policy on the border," McMaster said. "I was there last week. I saw the Trump wall. It's big; it's beautiful. Nobody can get over it. They stopped it. You've got tractors, excavators, all sorts of new equipment, millions of dollars just sitting there. Concrete getting ready to get poured."

He added that while he and others were looking at what was left of the wall construction, "yards away, you've got people jumping over the little fence that the border wall, the Trump wall, was there to replace. They are jumping over that fence and trying to run into El Paso."

But the Biden administration can stop the problem if it will admit that former President Donald Trump "had it right," McMaster said.  

"We have got to build that wall," he said. "If we have the wall and strong policies at the border, we don't have these problems in the states. We have enough problems in the states right now without having this added to it."

McMaster said he also visited with South Carolina National Guard troops while in Texas, and he added that the problems at the border are also not the fault of the Guard or of the Border Patrol, both of whom are "doing the best they can, and they are doing very well."

But, he said, it's "impossible to stop the flow of illegals across that border when you have got the coyotes and the cartels. They have switched to smuggling children and people instead of drugs because it's more profitable. It is impossible to stop them without a strong wall, the Trump wall there. The Biden administration ought to admit they messed up because the states are not going to be left holding the bag in trying to solve this problem for an incompetent Biden administration policy."

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