Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.) criticized the Biden administration for turning Border Patrol agents into “travel agents.”
Ms. Lee, who sits on the Committee on Homeland Security, said the Biden administration has created a crisis in the United States due to its border policies.
“We have brave men and women of Border Patrol who are down there, ready, willing, and able who want to enforce our laws, who want to fight for our country,” Ms. Lee said in an interview with
Fox News on Dec. 26. However, the congresswoman said the agents “are being assigned tasks like passing out blankets and working as travel agents to just bring people into this country.”
Ms. Lee expressed concerns about the identities of these illegal immigrants.
“We don’t know who they are. We don’t know where they’re going. We do know that quite a number of these people, some are even on the terror watch list, and they’re getting spread out throughout America with these notices to appear that many of them simply ignore,” she said.
“So this is a crisis that is a true danger to our country and something that House Republicans are committed to putting a stop to.”
The congresswoman’s remarks came just days after Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced new data for November,
reporting that 17 individuals on the FBI’s terror watch list tried to enter the United States illegally. The agency also reported over 242,000 illegal immigrants encountered at the southern border, marking the third-highest monthly total.
A sweeping border security and immigration legislation called the Secure the Border Act (H.R.2) was
passed by a vote of 219-213 in May, with two Republicans joining all Democrats in voting against the bill. If enacted, the legislation would resume construction of the border walls, tighten asylum standards, and increase the number of border patrol agents, among other things.
House Republicans have been
calling on Senate Democrats to
support the legislation.
“In May, @HouseGOP passed the strongest border security bill in history,” Ms. Lee
wrote on X, formerly Twitter, in September. “I urge my colleagues in the Senate to pass H.R.2 in order to secure our borders once and for all. We cannot continue putting American communities and lives at risk.”
During the Fox interview, Ms. Lee also highlighted the fentanyl crisis in the United States.
“We’ve watched for three years while President Biden sat back and talked about things like root causes while allowing the drug cartels to take operational control of our border,“ she said. ”The situation that this has created across America and in our communities is tragic, and it’s dangerous.
“We know that it’s not just people coming across. We’ve seen the consequences of fentanyl trafficking, human trafficking, and there’s just no reason at this point to have any confidence that Joe Biden actually wants to secure the border.”
‘Build a Wall’
Mexico cartels have been
buying precursor chemicals from China to make fentanyl, and ship finished products to the United States. Fentanyl overdose deaths
tripled between 2016 and 2021, becoming the
leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 and 45.
In October, Polk County deputies in Florida announced the arrests of three individuals and the seizure of 10 kilograms of fentanyl.
“10 Kilograms is enough Fentanyl to kill 5 million people if taken in overdose amounts,”
said Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd in a statement. “Of the three men arrested during this investigation, two are in the country illegally, and the Sinaloa Cartel drug trafficking organization is the source of supply for this poison.”
The Florida congressman said solutions to the border crisis are simple.
“We had them during the Trump administration; we need to build a wall and have a physical barrier,” she said. “And we also need to be enforcing our laws and policies like ‘Remain-in Mexico’ to stop this unprecedented flood of people coming across our border illegally.”
