“This is inhumane, it is wrong,” Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Friday at a press conference on the southern border of the United States. Cruz and 18 fellow Republican U.S. senators went to the Rio Grande River — the international border separating Mexico from the United States — to illustrate what Cruz called a “direct consequence of policy decisions by the Biden Administration to stop building the wall, to return to catch-and-release, and to end the stay-in-Mexico policy.”
Other Republican senators who made the trip to the border were James Lankford of Oklahoma; John Cornyn of Texas; John Thune of South Dakota; John Barrasso of Wyoming; Chuck Grassley of Iowa; Susan Collings of Maine; Lindsey Graham of South Carolina; John Hoeven of North Dakota; Ron Johnson of Wisconsin; Mike Lee of Utah; Tom Cotton of Arkansas; John Kennedy of Louisiana; Tommy Tuberville of Alabama; Mike Braun of Indiana; Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi; Thom Tillis of North Carolina; Dan Sullivan of Alaska; and Steve Daines of Montana.
They told the media what they saw at the holding facility in Donna, Texas. Lankford said that 700 children were crammed into a facility designed to hold 80 children.
Lankford added, “I know why President Biden doesn’t want the media to be here — because we do have an open border.” Biden has refused to allow journalists to visit the holding facilities.
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In his own Thursday press conference, Biden continued to claim that he had a policy of transparency on the human tragedy occurring at the border. “I’ve been working from the moment this started to happen to try to find additional access for children to be able to safely — not just children, but particularly children — to be able to safely be housed while we follow through on the rest of what’s happening,” Biden claimed.
“All of us today witnessed the Biden cages,” Cruz said. Ironically, when Donald Trump was president, the media was very concerned about children in what they termed “cages.” Now, under Democratic President Joe Biden, much like it was for Democratic President Barack Obama, the media has little to no concern about children in “cages.”
Cruz called what was happening a “tragedy,” and said it was “heartbreaking.” Cruz charged that the Biden administration was “taking people who are testing positive for COVID-19 and locking them in cages side by side. This is inhumane. There was no six-foot space, there was no three-foot space, there wasn’t even a three-inch space between children lined up one, after the other, after the other.”
(Ironically, a reporter appeared more concerned about Cruz not wearing a mask during a press conference, rather than what was going on with the children at the border, and their exposure to the virus. Cruz later retweeted the remarks by writer James Surowiecki, who noted that White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki had been speaking at briefings with no mask since the new administration took office.)
It is yet another example of mainstream media bias, which regularly slants its news to favor the Democrats over the Republicans. Cruz had asked the Biden Administration to allow the media to accompany the senators to the overcrowded facility in Donna, but the request was denied. Both the Trump and Obama administrations had allowed access to the media, but not Biden.
“The Biden Administration wants to hide what is going on here,” Cruz said. “The American people have a right to know what is happening here. This is a man-made crisis. It was avoidable, it was preventable.”
Biden has said media access to the facilities will be allowed — sometime — but has not established either a time frame or any criteria for such access. “I will commit to transparency, and — as soon as I am in a position to be able to implement what we are doing right now.” When asked when that will be, Biden said, “I don’t know.”
Lankford compared the situation on the border to three months ago, when Trump was president. “This is nonsensical what we’re seeing in policy, and we saw none of this just three months ago.”
Not surprisingly, the man Cruz defeated in the Senate race in Texas in 2018, Beto O’Rourke, responded, “Thank God you survived the heckling” to Cruz’s description of how “cartel members, human traffickers right on the other side of the river, waving flashlights yelling and taunting Americans, taunting the Border Patrol, because they know that under the current policy the Biden Administration, they can flood over here.”
Eduardo Silva, speaking for the Democratic National Committee, accused Cruz and his fellow Republican senators of grandstanding for the cameras. “If there’s one thing Ted Cruz knows how to do, it is to disingenuously grandstand for TV cameras.” Silva added that Cruz is a “clown.”
Interestingly, that is how Biden described Trump during their TV debate last year — a “clown.”
Apparently, that is the level of discourse that the Left must resort to. They certainly do not want to take responsibility for their open borders immigration policy that is causing the present humanitarian crisis on the border.
And, since President Biden does not appear ready to do his job, and protect the states from this invasion we are witnessing along the border, states such as Texas have announced they will step up and stem the tide of illegal entry into the country. While the Constitution requires the federal government to protect the states from invasion, if the federal government is not going to do so, state officials must protect their own people.
And, since the media is not going to do its job, but instead does all it can to protect their fellow Democrat, President Joe Biden, now Republican senators have to convey the message themselves.
