Arizona Attorney General to Biden: Fire Kamala as border czar now

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

The Republican Attorney General of Arizona invited Vice-President Kamala Harris to visit the Arizona border and observe firsthand the crisis at the state’s border. That invitation was issued last month. Since then, Kamala, the designated border czar, has not taken him up on the offer. Now the attorney general, Mark Brnovich, says it’s time to fire Kamala as border czar.

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Brnovich rightly points out that Kamala finds time in her busy schedule to travel to other states, just not those on the Mexican border. She does travel to her home state of California but doesn’t bother to go to that state’s border either. Brnovich says it is insulting to Americans in border states to be ignored, especially during this crisis which is a historic level. The Biden administration is being tested and it is failing miserably.

“Mr. President, we cannot afford another day, week or month of apathy and inaction by any official in your administration charged with upholding our federal immigration laws and ensuring public safety,” the Republican attorney general wrote.

He went on to describe Kamala’s performance as border czar as “abysmal” and asked that Biden replace her.

“I’m very frustrated with what’s happening. We have seen just in the last several months about 450,000 people cross into our southern border illegally,” the attorney general said. Brnovich said Arizona’s border officials are overwhelmed and understaffed and said he personally invited the vice president to take a tour with him but never got a response back.

“I just was hoping that she would understand that as a former law enforcement official, as a former A.G., as a first-generation American like myself that she would be empathetic and understand the need to come down here and see for herself,” Brnovich said.

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Countering his concern is Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway, a Democrat. He says that there is no immigration crisis on the border, it’s an economic crisis. He even goes so far as to deny that the numbers in this crisis are unusually large. He suggests a border czar should at least be familiar with the southern border.

Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway agrees that the vice president should come down and see what’s going on but also has a very different opinion from the attorney general. “We don’t have a migrant crisis here and I’ve forced myself to memorize the statistics because there’s a lot of fuzzy math floating around,” Hathaway said. He said Santa Cruz County is dealing with an economic crisis but not a migrant crisis and said numbers of illegal entries are no worse now than they’ve been in years past. But he did say he wouldn’t mind seeing specific qualities in a new “border czar” if Biden does replace Harris.

“Maybe somebody that’s familiar with the southwest border issues, maybe that’s worked here or at least include them if you have an entourage to look into this,” Hathaway said. Arizona’s Family reached out to the White House to ask what their response is to this letter, but they said they won’t be commenting on it.

That is some heavy border denial right there. But he says the same as other Democrats, including Harris. They choose to concentrate on economic support for people in the Northern Triangle. The problem with that is that it doesn’t help the immediate crisis. Economic programs and support of foreign governments take years to finesse. They often fail, as we have seen time and time again, especially in Central American countries. Corrupt leaders end up with the money sent to help their citizens instead of them using the financial support to provide help for those in need. Biden is taking the status-quo approach that has been taken for decades. Trump took a more practical, common-sense approach and reaped the benefits of actually working with foreign leaders and forging agreements with them.

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The Biden administration insists that the border is closed and that they have everything under control. This chart shows numbers that disagree with that premise.

Senators Mitt Romney and Ron Johnson aggressively questioned DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas yesterday in a committee meeting. They provided visual aides with data on apprehensions. It showed that apprehensions plummeted when Trump left office. Open borders advocates and blanket amnesty supporters called foul on the numbers being displayed by the two senators.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, first noted the discrepancy on Twitter.

“How deceptive was the chart that @RonJohnsonWI and @SenatorRomney displayed at today’s hearing on migrant children?” wrote Reichlin-Melnick. “I mapped out the missing data to show you what the chart ‘mysteriously’ left out-a trend of rising border encounters that began months before Biden took office.”

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Reichlin-Melnick couches his criticism by saying he doesn’t think it was a deliberate attempt by either senator to provide a false narrative. He blames staff for the mistakes he alleges. What he doesn’t admit, though, is that the increase in the number of illegal migrants flooding the southern border did rise somewhat toward the end of Trump’s term in office and that it is likely due to Biden sending such a strong signal that he was going to end all of the successful Trump initiatives to secure the border. The migrants knew the time was right to come to the border and that when Biden entered office, they would be free to remain in the U.S. It was not a failure of the Trump administration, it was the promise of an open border once Biden came in.

He can throw Senator Johnson’s staff under the bus all he wants, but to deny that the crisis at the southern border is a historic event is ludicrous. The numbers don’t lie. A group of Republican governors has written to Biden. They call for him to implement actions to end the border crisis.

“The crisis is too big to ignore and is now spilling over the border states into all of our states,” wrote Governor Noem and the other governors. “The cause of the border crisis is entirely due to reckless federal policy reversals executed within your first 100 days in office. The rhetoric of the Biden Administration and the rollback of critical agreements with our allies have led to the inhumane treatment of tens of thousands of children and undermined a fragile immigration system.”

The border crisis has also exacerbated the opioid epidemic, a problem that Governor Noem has prioritized fixing. CBP reports a 233% increase in the seizure of fentanyl compared to January last year. “Law enforcement officials are recovering drugs, illegal narcotics, and weapons being smuggled across the border by cartels—the same cartels that are also trafficking men, women, and children and jeopardizing their lives,” wrote the governors.

Along with Governor Noem, the letter was signed by Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, Idaho Governor Brad Little, Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves, Missouri Governor Greg Parsons, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte, Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Utah Governor Spencer Cox, and Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon.

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Don’t expect these governors to get any more cooperation from Team Biden than the Arizona attorney general is getting. The denial of a crisis is deep and there is no sign of that changing.

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John Stossel 8:30 AM | October 12, 2024
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