Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) warned during a Fox News interview this week that the situation on the U.S.-Mexico border will become a full-fledged crisis “very soon” if President Joe Biden does not take action to stop what is happening.
“The numbers have been increasing … The number of unaccompanied kids, the number of families that are coming in are just increasing every day,” Cuellar said Tuesday. “In my district, just a couple of days ago, 166 people [crossed the border], and it just goes on and just different numbers are going up. So it’s not a crisis yet, but it’s going to get there very soon.”
Cuellar said that the Biden administration needed to take action to stop the illegal immigration taking place on the border, according to Fox News.
“The words that are spoken are not going to stop them,” he said. “You got organizations, criminal organizations that make billions of dollars, and every time they bring somebody over here, they make a lot of money. So the organizations are going to move around, and you’ve got to have certain processes in place. Otherwise people are going to start continuing.”
On Wednesday, Cuellar appeared on Fox News for a separate interview with host Neil Cavuto, who asked Cuellar he would “urge President Biden to slow down.”
“Yes, absolutely,” Cuellar responded. “In fact, I’ve told the folks that I’ve talked to at the White House, let’s be cautious. In my opinion, what the White House needs to do is they cannot only listen to the immigration activists, advocates, they also need to listen to the communities on the border that I represent, the mayors, the judges, the NGOs down there, and with that, he can come up with a balanced approach.”
“Otherwise, who’s carrying the burden of all this Everything we’re seeing down there at the border?” he added. “It’s not the people who live 1500 miles away [it’s] those … people that live in my community right at the at the border.”
Axios reported on Monday that Cuellar “hopes the administration continues using a Trump-era public health order to quickly expel migrant adults and families, at least during the pandemic.”
“He said smugglers will likely use the shift in immigration tactics from the Trump to the Biden administration to convince migrants to come to the U.S,” Axios added.
In another interview this week, Cuellar addressed the ongoing pandemic and the alleged lack of testing for COVID-19 of those who are being released into the U.S.
“I got border mayors saying, ‘Woah, hold it, hold it. Our hospitals are full, we are not getting enough vaccines right now, so you’re releasing undocumented people at our bus stations and our centers without checking them,’” Cuellar said.