Ron DeSantis rolled out a detailed plan to secure the nation’s borders, something he’s said he’ll begin implementing on the first day of his presidency—if elected.
Speaking in Eagle Pass, Texas—on the Rio Grande River on June 26—the Florida governor and candidate for the Republican nomination touted a plan listing 35 actions he commits to taking under subheadings like “Stop the Invasion,” “Build the Wall,” “Hold Cartels Accountable” and “Work With States to Enforce the Law.”
His pledges include everything from tightening up on “catch-and-release” and other abused policies—to deploying the military at the border and, if necessary, into Mexican territory to stop cartel activity.
He says he’ll use the Navy and Coast Guard to stop the importation of fentanyl precursor chemicals into Mexico if the latter doesn’t cooperate in cracking down on it.
In a speech to supporters and a press conference afterward with the river behind him, accompanied by U.S. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), DeSantis came back again to the many woes of the southern border: Fentanyl surging into the country and causing drug overdose deaths. Crime committed by illegal aliens. An overbroad system for allowing “asylum.”
Children are used as pawns to help unrelated adults enter the United States.
A court system releasing illegal immigrants into the nation with court dates that they usually skip, set years in advance.
The violence along the border itself. An overtaxed Border Patrol and Coast Guard inadequately supported by the Biden administration.
He told his Texas audience that while some seek to pigeonhole the border crisis as a Texas or Arizona problem, “When you don’t have control of your own border, that’s an American problem.”
Drug deaths throughout the country are caused by fentanyl coming across the border. Social services are strapped by the cost of providing medical services and welfare payments for illegal immigrants. They burden the justice system.
DeSantis noted he’d sent Florida forces to help at the Texas border twice. Some are there now, 400 members of the Florida Natural Guard, Highway Patrol, and Fish and Wildlife Commission. And he sent them in 2021 as well.
“What we’re saying is there’s no excuses on this. Get the job done. Make it happen. We want results. We don’t want hollow rhetoric. We don’t want empty promises,” he said.
Republicans and Democrats alike “are always chirping about this and yet never actually bringing the issue to a conclusion.”
He pointed to aggressive actions he’s taken in Florida as governor. When an overtaxed Coast Guard began depositing refugees they’d intercepted on beaches in the Florida Keys, DeSantis declared a state of emergency and mobilized state marine forces to the area.
They intercepted boats with migrants from Cuba and Haiti on them and then gave them to the Coast Guard at sea. The Coast Guard then could deport them back to their countries of origin, he said.
DeSantis sent 50 illegal immigrants to the tiny Massachusetts resort island of Martha’s Vineyard, which billed itself as a “sanctuary city.” The town has a “refugee welcome center,” he said—but declared a state of emergency because 50 showed up at once.
“I guess they’ve never actually served anyone. Think about the town down here in South Texas. If you just had 50 one day, that would be a good day, right?”
Florida has mandated employers’ use of E-Verify to verify job applicants’ legal residency and eligibility to work, he said.
He has made criminal laws tougher for drug traffickers selling to minors or whose drugs kill children.
DeSantis says his border plans combat the problem at every level. He pledges to work with Congress and the administrative agencies; to end catch-and-release, holding apprehended illegals until their court dates.
Asylum seekers will have to remain in Mexico while their claims are processed. The governor said he’ll raise Border Patrol pay; direct Homeland Security to recruit military veterans and police officers for the Border Patrol; and end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants.
And he’ll tax the money illegal aliens send abroad, with exemptions for citizens and legal residents; end prosecutorial discretion in immigration cases and deport criminal aliens; strengthen the use of E-Verify; prosecute entities that seek to circumvent immigration law and strengthen penalties for human trafficking and smuggling.
Among other promises are: Deporting those who overstay visas; ceasing funding to non-governmental organizations that encourage human smuggling and mass migration; seeking to reinstate agreements with Central American countries to reinstate asylum agreements; giving immigration judges more authority, and requiring the Justice Department to narrow grounds for a continuance of court cases and other delaying tactics.
And if countries don’t accept deportees DeSantis plans to restrict visas.
If elected, he “will use every dollar available to him as president and every dollar he can squeeze out of Congress” to build the wall along the 600 remaining miles of open border, according to his campaign’s statement.
“The Left tries to make fun of a border wall, but walls work,” his campaign said in releasing his plans.
“Israel built a 152-mile-long fence along its border with Egypt. Once completed, illegal crossings dropped by more than 99 percent year-over-year.”
DeSantis pledges to hold the drug cartels accountable, designating them as transnational criminal organizations and sanctioning them, their leaders, and those who do business with them.
And DeSantis says he wants “appropriate rules of engagement” for using force along the border. He decried human traffickers boldly cutting through the wall’s steel beams even where it’s been built.
“If someone were breaking into your house to do something bad, you would respond with force. Why don’t we do that at the southern border? If the cartels are cutting through the border wall, trying to run product into this country, they’re going to end up stone-cold dead as a result of that bad decision.
“And if you do that one time, you are not going to see them mess with our wall ever again.”
DeSantis goes even further. He says in his plan that if the Mexican government “drags its feet,” he’ll reserve the right for U.S. forces to operate in Mexico to secure American territory from cartel activities.
“If the Mexican government won’t stop cartel drug manufacturing, DeSantis will surge resources to the Navy and the Coast Guard and block precursor chemicals from entering Mexican ports,” his plan states.
DeSantis talked of the “Angel Moms,” mothers whose children have lost their lives to border-related violence.
One spoke with him, Florida State Rep. Kiyan Michael, a Jacksonville Republican motivated to run after her son died in an auto accident with a twice-deported illegal immigrant, who only received two years of jail time.
“As Angel parents, we get tired of hearing ‘we’re gonna do something, we’re gonna do something’ and nothing happens,” she said. When she told DeSantis her story in 2019, “I could see that he actually cared and we could tell a difference.”
“I can see everything that you told us you were going to do, you have done, and I thank you for that,” she said. “We need you as president, we you to stand for us. There is nobody else that’s gonna fight like this governor fights.”
Roy detailed the violence Texans have lived with on a daily basis.
“We’ve got a system that is indefensible. It’s causing ranchers in this room that I’ve talked to, to find bodies on their ranches.
“Or 53 human beings that were cooked in a tractor-trailer in San Antonio last summer.
“All of this on the watch of an administration that doesn’t care.”
