On Saturday, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) appeared on “Fox & Friends” with host Pete Hegseth to discuss the ongoing border wall battle taking place between President Trump and Democratic leadership in the House and Senate.
The exchange began with Hegseth asking Roy about his experience at the border.
HEGSETH: You were there on the border with them [border patrol] at night. What did you see?
ROY: Good morning, Pete. Great to talk to you again. I was down there with my fellow Congressman Dan Crenshaw, and what we saw was frankly pretty shocking. This is not my first time to the border. I’ve seen a lot of the problems, but what we’re having today is essentially [a] daily caravan. We saw upwards of 800 to 1,000 people coming across our southern border through the Rio Grande Valley sector. I personally saw about a 150, went down and spoke to them in my broken Spanish, and I got some understanding about what’s going on.
And the one thing you know for sure is that the cartels have operational control of our southern border – particularly along the Rio Grande Valley sector. … And they are making enormous profits running people across the border, endangering American citizens, and the lives of the migrants in the process.
Roy then said that the area across the border from the Rio Grande Valley sector is designated a “level 4 danger zone,” according to the State Department:
It’s unconscionable that we, as a nation, the most powerful nation the world has ever known, are allowing this to happen in our backyard, where these little girls and these kids are getting exploited by cartels as they move through the Rio Grande Valley. And one thing we learned is that the state in Mexico right across the border from the Rio Grande Valley area in the United States is a level 4 danger zone, which makes it a “no travel zone” in our state department, which makes it more dangerous than even Honduras, and El Salvador, and Guatemala, and the countries people are coming from because the cartels have so much power.
Hegseth noted that despite “level 4” being “the same level as Afghanistan and Libya … we’re debating whether a wall would be helpful.” He then added that when he speaks with border patrol agents, they tell him that wherever physical barriers exist, border crossings fall “dramatically.”
Roy responded:
Yeah, there’s no question. I mean, this idea that fencing and physical assets don’t work is just insane. Just look at the Rio Grande Valley sector itself. On the eastern portion, closer to the Gulf, we have significant miles of fencing and infrastructure and roads, and then at the western portion, we have very little. 94% of the traffic in the Rio Grande Valley comes from the McAllen section, the western section, of the Rio Grande Valley sector. So, fencing clearly works.
We saw in California where we saw the fencing added in the mid-1990s, you had 500,000, 600,000 apprehensions a year; now you have closer to 30,000. The idea that fencing doesn’t work is completely silly, and the border patrol knows it, and they’re begging us, literally begging us, to come down and give them the resources they need – more agents, fencing, cameras, so they can do their job.
Hegseth asked what message Roy would give to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
Roy replied:
The speaker of the house is embarrassing herself. She should get her head out of her rear end and stop ignoring what’s happening on our southern border so that we can protect American citizens and protect the migrants who seek to come here.
And it’s not just about doing the physical barriers, it’s also about ending the asylum crisis by changing our laws that are the magnet that is endangering these kids coming across the border. And we need to change it. Frankly, this is all political posturing, and it’s embarrassing for the Speaker of the House of Representatives to be shutting down the House after less than two days last week … and have show votes instead of doing her job.
As for supporting an “emergency declaration” by President Trump regarding the border wall, Roy stated:
I’d like to see what the president has to say. I will say this – we have an emergency at our border that needs to be dealt with. We’ve got to look at the laws. I want to make sure Congress does its job, and that we fund the necessary assets and get behind our border patrol.
Check out the entire video here: