The five Republican presidential candidates who attended Wednesday night’s third GOP primary debate in Miami outlined their plans to stop the millions of people illegally coming into the U.S. and the flow of fentanyl that is killing tens of thousands of Americans per year.
Each of the candidates was asked about the topic during the second half of the debate after co-moderator Hugh Hewitt highlighted the problems, including illegal immigration, terrorists coming across the border, and the flow of drugs onto U.S. streets.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) said that the southern border needed to be closed and that it would take approximately $15 billion to secure it through various means.
“For $10 billion, we could close our southern border,” he said. “For an additional $5 billion, we could use the currently available military technology to surveil our southern border to stop fentanyl from crossing our border. I’ve already led on legislation that would sanction the Mexican cartels. If you remember the path, the precursors come from China, then they are manufactured in Mexican labs, and then the Mexican cartels bring them across our border. By sanctioning their accounts and eliminating their cash, we starve them of what they need.”
Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said that the U.S. needed to “beef up what our law enforcement has in terms of technology” at the ports of entry into the U.S. to detect people smuggling in drugs.
“On day one, I would sign an executive order that would send the National Guard to partner with Customs and Border Patrol, both at ports of entry and at the open ports of our border,” he said. “Customs and Border Patrol agents are overwhelmed. There’s 200,000 encounters a month over the last 11 months. We simply do not have the man and woman power at the border to be able to deal with it. And so dealing with both law enforcement, and you’re right, we have done this, we can do this, but we got to give them the tools to do it and technology is one of the biggest tools that we don’t have enough of at the ports of entry.”
He said that he would also focus on lowering the demand for drugs in the U.S. by getting people mental health treatment and treating drug addiction as a disease.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that he will declare a national emergency on his first day in office and he will send the U.S. Military to the southern border.
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“I’m going to stop the invasion cold. I am going to deport people who came illegally, and I’m even going to build the border wall and have Mexico pay for it like Donald Trump promised,” he said. “We’re going to impose fees on the remittances that foreign workers send to foreign countries. We’ll raise billions of dollars, I’ll build a wall. But we are going to designate the cartels to be Foreign Terrorist Organizations or something similar to that, and we’re going to authorize the use of deadly force. We’re going to have maritime operations to interdict precursor chemicals going into Mexico. But I’ll tell you this, if someone in the drug cartels is sneaking fentanyl across the border when I’m president, that’s going to be the last thing they do. We’re going to shoot them stone cold dead.”
Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley also highlighted the devastation that the fentanyl crisis has caused in the U.S. and said that she would end trade relations with China until it stops.
“The second thing is we’ll send special operations in to take out the cartels,” she said. “We need to go to where they’re distributing it, where the supply centers are, and take them out. We’ll put 25,000 more Border Patrol and ICE agents on the ground and let them do their job. We will defund sanctuary cities. We will go back to the Remain in Mexico policy so that everybody stays in Mexico and they never get here in the first place.”
She also added that she believes the U.S. needed to focus more on treating people with mental health and addiction problems.
Vivek Ramaswamy said that he agreed with how DeSantis talked about the issue and that the issue was not even about people overdosing, it was about them being poisoned, which DeSantis said that he agreed with.
“If you put that fentanyl in a Big Mac, we would not call that an overdose. You’d call it what it is. It’s closer to bio-terrorism,” he said, adding that the U.S. needed to build a wall on the southern and northern border.
He also talked about the importance of destroying tunnels that cartels use to smuggle people and drugs into the U.S.
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