Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake reiterated her promise to declare the border crisis an “invasion” if elected.
Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday, Lake said that the influx of illegal aliens crossing the border and the sheer amount of deadly fentanyl being trafficked across warrants such a categorization. As such, Lake said she would use her authority to recruit help from other states to help secure the border.
“[I]f you know the Constitution, you know that Article 4, Section 4 calls for the federal government to protect us from invasion, and under Joe Biden’s lack of leadership, we just aren’t seeing that,” Lake said. “And we have an invasion at our border, the cartels, these narco-terrorist groups have operational control. And they’re using Arizona to smuggle people, to traffic children and to traffic the most dangerous drug we’ve ever seen, fentanyl.”
“And so we’re going to invoke our Article One, Section 10– authority to take care of our own border and protect our own border,” she continued. “It’s right there in black and white in the Constitution. And we meet all three criteria, we have an invasion, our people are in imminent danger, and time is of the essence. There’s no time for delay. So we’re going to have other states offer help. I’ve already got a couple other governors who are willing to help out.”
Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution says that the federal government “shall protect each of them against Invasion.” Article 1, Section 10, meanwhile, prohibits individual states from entering “into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or [engaging] in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.”
On the issues page on her campaign website, Lake promises to create a compact with other border states to declare an invasion along the southern border and establish their right to secure it.
“[M]ake no mistake: with nearly two million illegal immigrant apprehensions this past year and another estimated 400,000 that evaded border patrol agents, courtesy of violent international drug cartels operating inside northern Mexico, this is an invasion,” the page reads.
Four counties along the border in Texas– Kinney, Goliad, Terrell, and Uvalde Counties– have already declared an invasion at the border, as The Daily Wire reported. Around the same time, an NPR/Ipsos poll found that a majority of Americans, 53%, believed that the border crisis amounting to an “invasion” was “somewhat true” or “completely true.”