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WATCH: ‘The Situation Is Completely Unstable’: Crenshaw Tours The Southern Border

Video from a DPS helicopter illustrates the huge gaps in the border wall

   DailyWire.com
WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 17: House Homeland Security Committee member Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) questions witnesses during a hearing on 'worldwide threats to the homeland' in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill September 17, 2020 in Washington, DC. Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said he would issue a subpoena for acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf after he did not show for the hearing. An August Government Accountability Office report found that Wolf's appointment by the Trump Administration, which has regularly skirted the Senate confirmation process, was invalid and a violation of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

On Saturday, Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw posted video of him touring the southern border of the United States between Texas and Mexico, with  video from a helicopter illustrating the huge gaps in the border wall where illegal immigrants can cross into the United States. Crenshaw explained that migrants have to pay drug smugglers to get across, as the smugglers use the huge number of migrants to distract Border Patrol so they can get their drugs across the border. He also focused on the fact that Texas has to invest huge sums of money to protect its border because the federal government refuses to do all it can to deal with the crisis.

Crenshaw began, “Right now, I’m at the CBP station in Edinburg; just got a briefing from Texas Department of Public Safety. And look, here’s going to be the big takeaway from today and everything we’ve put out about what’s going on on the border: the situation is completely unstable: that’s the takeaway.”

“The state of Texas has to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to take up the slack,” he continued. “Texas has to fund Operation Drawbridge; they’ve got to fund an operation to secure Texas, which means, in practical terms, they’ve got to fund camera systems; they’ve got to fund the personnel and the officers to go try to catch drug traffickers that are getting through because CBP is dealing with 100 migrant families at a time. Why? Because the Biden administration basically decided that they don’t really want to enforce the law anymore, and that creates a backend for more and more people to come across. Why? Because they get a bus ticket and they get to go wherever they want even if they have a positive drug test. We’re going to get to the bottom of this.”

“The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) today announced that Operation Drawbridge – the law enforcement initiative using motion-detection camera system along the Texas-Mexico border – was responsible for more than 29,300 apprehensions and 88,400 pounds of drugs being seized in 2014,” The Texas Department of Public Safety noted in 2015.

Crenshaw took video of areas where the border wall has not been finished, asserting that President Biden refuses to finish it.

“Spent the whole morning with the Texas Department of Public Safety,” Crenshaw stated. “The reason I did that this morning was because I wanted to demonstrate how much work Texas has to do, how much Texas has to foot the bill for the crisis we have at the border so often.”

“But there’s a reason for that, and this is sort of how it works,” he continued. “When Border Patrol gets overwhelmed with migrants, especially migrant families and unaccompanied children just turning themselves in because they know they’ll get released into the interior, what happens is there’s huge swaths of territory that’s just left unchecked. The Border Patrol cannot control the border so you need to rely on state authorities to do that; that’s why we were just out in the boat on the maritime unit; we were out in the helicopter and the aviation unit. Texas invests a lot of money in this, hundreds of millions of dollars a year to help out, and they’ve got a great working relationship with Border Patrol.”

“Look, in these areas you’re seeing a huge spike; just leaving the station just now they’re calling it a crisis,” Crenshaw pointed out. “It’s unprecedented; that’s a factual description. Over 6,000 migrants apprehended just this month in that one station; that’s just one station along the border in Texas, the Rio Grande city station. And they expect that to possibly double within the next month; that’s just the trend that they’re seeing.”

He segued to drug smugglers using the migrants to distract Border Patrol so the smugglers can get their drugs across the border: “What’s causing this? First of all, it’s important to note that drug smugglers play a huge part of this; they know how to distract CBP. They do it on purpose. You can’t cross the border unless you pay a toll to a drug smuggler; you just can’t do it. They don’t let you; they also monitor migrants on this side of the border as well; they have stash houses all throughout; they have an entire system in place. It’s part of their human smuggling network as well; often children get smuggled as a result of this, of labor smuggling. So there’s lots of different forms of human trafficking. But the point is you’re distracting Border Patrol, and that means that it’s easier for the drug cartels to get their drugs in between.”

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