Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) said that Republican governors are sending a message about the border crisis by transporting migrants to sanctuary cities.
Appearing on CNN‘s “State of the Union” Sunday, Rounds said that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) are “doing their best” to deal with the influx of migrants at the southern border by using buses to draw attention to the problem. Rounds said his own state, 1200 miles away, is dealing with the consequences of illegal immigration, so the governors are doing what they can to emphasize unlawful crossings and the Biden administration’s lack of action.
“[DeSantis and Abbott are] doing their best to try to send a message to the rest of the nation about the plight of those individuals that are coming from south of the border,” Rounds told host Jake Tapper. “You’re talking about 3.4 million people just since the start of this Biden Administration that have crossed the border. They’re coming into southern states. What is a governor supposed to do?”
“They’re trying to send a message to the rest of the country that this is not acceptable, and that their states can’t handle that type of an inflow,” he continued. “That’s an equivalent of four times the population of my state of South Dakota. But Jake, it’s more than that. It’s also everything else come across the border at the same time. We’re 1200 miles away from the border in South Dakota, yet the drug trafficking affects our state as well. Our Native American population, reservations have got huge inflows of drug trafficking coming into our state, into some of the heaviest poverty areas of the entire country. It’s affecting the states but the administration isn’t doing anything about it.”
Abbott said in an interview on Friday with Fox News that he began the busing initiative for the express purpose of bringing the border crisis directly to the Biden administration.
“We have small communities of about 25,000 people who have thousands of illegal immigrants dumped into their community,” said Abbott. “And so, they were begging for relief. And that’s exactly why we began this busing operation to Washington, D.C.”
“And so, if [the Biden administration] will not go to the border, we’re taking the border to them so they can see the challenges they’re opposing to the entire United States of America,” he added.
DeSantis pinned the blame squarely on the Biden administration’s failure to enforce the law at the border. “This is a massive policy failure by the president,” DeSantis said Friday. “This is a massive and intentional policy that is causing huge amount of damage all across the country. And it’s all rooted in a failure to take care that the laws are faithfully executed and to fulfill his oath of office.”
DeSantis added that his decision to fly 50 illegal migrants to Martha’s Vineyard prompted more coverage from legacy media reporters than “have ever gone down to the southern border to look what’s going on.”