President Biden should be held responsible for the ongoing immigration crisis, a border sheriff claims, as his executive orders have changed the way border officials have been able to enforce immigration laws.
In the first weeks of the Biden administration, the president signed dozens of orders overturning those orders first put into place by President Trump—many specifically impacting the resources and responsibilities of immigration offices.
“When President Biden rescinded the emergency order on the southwest border, it stopped resources, and it stopped construction on our border,” Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels said via the Daily Wire.
Dannels said Biden sent a clear message in rolling back Trump’s immigration policies.
“As a result of that, one area where the fence is not complete, we get five or six groups a day coming across there. It’s [opened up] the border. It opened up the message that it’s okay to come in this country,” he claimed.
“This administration owns this decision,” the sheriff continued per the report. “And what it’s doing is it’s forcing us back to 2019, where we had the largest what I call crime scene in the country to include the largest humanitarian situation going on.”
President Biden doesn’t think there’s a crisis at the southern border.
The numbers say otherwise. https://t.co/GReWsIPt85
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) March 5, 2021
Dannels then claimed the border was “wide open” — resulting in a disaster for immigration officials seeking to limit illegal travel.
The sheriff said the new situation was particularly frustrating as he claimed, “we had it under control [under Trump].”
As the Daily Wire reports, Dannels also said the border crisis could make an impact on public health amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and that he “would love to hear Dr. Fauci” talk about it.
“A year ago today, we were running, just on our camera system, 300 to 400 a month,” Dannels said, referencing the number of illegal border crossings. “In August, when the politics kicked up, we jumped up to 1,200 a month. In December, it was over 2,500 illegal entries to include over 500 pounds of illicit drugs. I just got the charts [the other day], it’s skyrocketing back to numbers we saw in 2019. The reason we have MPP and these other programs President Trump put in place was because the 2019 caravan and surges.”
“It worked [when the orders were enacted]” but “it’s not working now [that they’re gone],” he concluded.
Watch his comments below: