Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 492 | Busting Border Propaganda | Guest: Rep. Chip Roy

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

Today we're talking about the continuing humanitarian crisis unfolding at our southern border. Thousands upon thousands of Haitian migrants are camping out under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, and the misinformation about what's really going on is rampant. To help us get the story straight, we welcome U.S. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) back to the show. Rep. Roy has been very outspoken about the border crisis and has the facts about the sheer number of migrants seeking to cross into the U.S. The congressman also has insight on the horrific ordeals that migrants are too often subject to, including human trafficking. Then, after the interview with Rep. Roy, we discuss the theological side of the issue and see what the Bible has to say about countries and borders. --- Today's Sponsors: Annie's Kit Clubs provides a fresh way to dive into your favorite craft or try something new. Making things with your hands is so good for you & Annie's makes it easy. Go to AnniesKitClubs.com/ALLIE & save 50% off your first kit! Good Ranchers has traveled the US, meeting with actual farmers that raise the livestock to ensure the product they're sending you is the very best American craft beef and better-than-organic chicken. Go to GoodRanchers.com/ALLIE & use code 'ALLIE' at checkout to save 20% on each box of mouth-watering meals, plus get an additional $20 off & free express shipping! Dwell has built a beautiful listening & reading experience for the Scriptures, featuring a read along experience which lets you read big, bold text accompanied by beautiful background art. To get started, go to DwellApp.io/RELATABLE to get 10% off a yearly subscription, or 33% off Dwell for life! --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey, guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Tuesday. Hope everyone is having a wonderful day so far. So today we're going to talk about everything that's going on at the border. Congressman Chip Roy of Texas is going to tell us all of the facts that are going on there. We're going to bust some myths. And then we'll spend the second part of the podcast. talking about the theology of all of this and how I think we can approach this biblically. So without further ado, here is congressmanship Roy. Congressman Roy, thank you so much for joining us again, talking about this subject. Again, can you just paint a picture for us?

What's going on at the border right now? Why is it different than what has gone on in the border in the past, say, under the Trump administration? Well, right now, the southwest border in Texas, New Mexico is about as bad as I've ever ever seen it and it's getting worse by the day. And, you know, a lot of folks you think this is something that you know, some far away issue. But let's be very clear, this is an issue that's affecting every single American in one way or the other. We've had about 1.4 million. Okay, I want to say that number again, 1.4 million apprehensions over the last year. These are record numbers. We had 208,000 in August. We had 212,000 in July. That was prior to the recent Christ's respect to the

Haitian refugees. And the fact is those numbers, of course, don't tell the whole story. Of those 1.4 million, which, by the way, is the population of Dallas, about 500,000 or so, give or take, have been released, depends on what numbers you look at. And several hundred thousand are known gotaways that we've seen when we see camera footage and Intel. And so we know there's somewhere around 800,000-ish people that are now in the United States that have not been removed, that we're not here at the beginning of this year because of it. of the policies of the Biden administration, which are very specific and purposeful.

Okay. The Biden administration is refusing to do the things the Trump administration was doing to ensure that we could secure the border, specifically, the return to Mexico policies program that they worked out with Mexico through pressure with tariffs and trade. And we just had a federal judge say to the Biden administration, well, you're not doing this and you really should be doing this under our current law. And then secondly, what we call Title 42, which are health code laws, health code provisions that allow us to stop people at the border to protect the citizenry when you have pandemics or communicable diseases. Clearly, we have that situation now.

But the Biden administration has been refusing to apply it. Now you've got a federal judge that's saying you can't apply it to family units, which means the numbers are actually going to get worse if Congress doesn't act now to be very clear that we should apply to. Title 42 at the board. Now, what does all this mean in simple speak? Lots of danger for the American people. Narcotics, fentanyl flowing into our communities. Ninety-two thousand opioid deaths in the last year. And I want to put that in perspective. When we were freaking out about cocaine in the 1980s, we had about 10,000 people dying a year. We're now close to 100,000 people die in a year. Fentanyl is killing American young adults and young children. Why? Because they're taking drugs they think are something else and it's laced with fentanyl and they're dying.

This is because of the power of the cartels at the border and what Joe Biden is doing of refusing to do under his constitutional duty to secure the border. And you also said you shared a long Twitter threat about everything that's going on and some of the consequences that you just alluded to. One of the things that you said that the Biden administration is refusing to do is to vote necessary resources to the Border Patrol and to ICE and also refusing to designate cartels as terrorist organizations. Why do you think they're refusing to do that? And what help do you think that it would do if they did? Well, what you have on our border are very dangerous cartels.

And a lot of people sort of put this on a shelf like they're watching some HBO documentary about El Chapo or something. This is real. We now have the cartel Helisco New Generation, which is merged with the renalosa faction of the Gulf Cartel and the Cartel, and the Cartel del Noreste and Lézaites and Nuevalerredo. Now, why does that matter? Because these are very dangerous cartels. They bury human beings alive. They light them on fire. They put them into boiling oil. They hang them on bridges. They lock them into bars and light them on fire. And now we just had, in fact, a cartel individual who was apprehended in the United States having killed an individual in America. They're now reaching up into the United States. They move human

beings and narcotics for hundreds of millions of dollars of profit. We stopped an automobile in Bernie, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio. Let me be clear in a suburb of San Antonio. We stopped a car with nine people in it. It was driven by an individual who was an American citizen who was employed by the cartels on the rest day, who was moving these people to put them into a stash house in Houston to put them into the sex trafficking trade. This happens on a daily basis. And the cartels should be designated as terrorist organizations so that we could target them. So we could go after people who provide material support to them. They are as dangerous in many respects as the Taliban. And the two things that are,

common between those two entities, the United States refuses to acknowledge either of them as the terrorist organizations that they are. And you believe that the Biden administration's policy, some of which you have just listed, is actually kind of incentivizing or at least enabling this kind of behavior, making this kind of behavior easier, correct? No, that's exactly right. And people need to understand there's a direct consequence to the Biden administration and their lack of action. The Biden administration could be using Title IV. that I described before with respect to COVID. They could be using the return to Mexico program.

They could be providing more resources to supplement border patrol. And they could be taking more overt and specific action to turn people away and then return them to where they come from. Now, why does that matter? Because, and this is important, as a Christian and as people who want to care for individuals. Let me pause for a second. I met with a bunch of ranchers in South Texas, okay? And their fences are getting cut.

And their families are getting endangered. Their livestock is getting out. And they are finding dead bodies of migrants on their ranches. 89 dead migrants in Brooks County, 75 or more dead bodies in the Del Rio sector, hundreds all along South Texas. These ranchers find them dying or they're dehydrated in the process of dying and they call 911 to try to help them. Because as Christians and as human beings, you want to help people.

Migrants are getting hurt, okay? Migrants are dying. migrants are getting put into the sex trafficking trade. Migrants are getting put into the slave labor trade. Cartels are making tons of money. I sat down with a woman who runs safe houses for these folks that are abused by cartels. And she showed me graphic pictures of little girls with brands and burns on their bodies. They were horrific.

And videos where you see cartel members threatening little girls and people. And now to have the Biden administration refuse to take the steps to stem the tide, hold the line so that it would protect the migrants and protect Americans who are dying from fentanyl, whose property are getting destroyed, who are having massive numbers of people come to the United States, take jobs, fill hospitals, fill schools, all of the negative consequences of all of that. And the Biden administration could stop it. They just would take the steps necessary to do so. They refused to do it.

Hey, this is Steve Deist. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is, true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this Steve Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen And wherever you get podcasts, I hope you'll join us. I think we've all seen at least one video or image of a child that has been abandoned on the American side of the border. There was a photo that I saw just the other day of a four-year-old and what looks like

about a three-month-old infant that had been abandoned there. Thankfully, Border Patrol found them and got them to safety. There was another video that I saw the other day of this group of men. there were no women, men and little kids who seemed to be knocked out with some kind of medication. The Border Patrol had flashlights flashing in their eyes and the little kids. They weren't responding. They weren't waking up. And so we don't know exactly what was going on there.

But it's obvious that this kind of incentivizing of illegal activity and illegal crossing is hurting the most vulnerable. It's hurting not just the people at the border, but it's also hurting, like you said, the little kids that are being trafficked for profit. And then what we're seeing is the same Border Patrol agents who are the only lifeline for some of these kids, the only help that some of these kids have, the only salvation that these kids are having from sex trafficking are now being demonized by a media that, that is lying about, quote, whipping Haitian migrants. I want to play or I don't know if it's pictures or video. I think it's pictures that we have. I want to put up some pictures that we have seen of Border Patrol agents that are going around. So this is one of the pictures that's going around where people are saying,

I saw Sean King, for example, share on social media that this is a border patrol agent whipping this person and then there was. that was the one picture that was going around the most, that people were saying that this is a Border Patrol agent, whipping this migrant, Joy Reid said, what is this, 1851? There were multiple blue check journalists saying, wow, this is, you know, like the slave patrol. That's not at all what's happening here. And I would love for you to explain what you see happening. But as far as I understand, these are just split rains. These are horse rains. There's no whipping going on whatsoever. these are Haitian migrants that I guess are trying to cross illegally. And people are up in arms

about this saying that, you know, somehow this is racist. Yeah, I appreciate you showing those pictures and highlighting this issue. I mean, pretty much anybody who's not a completely stupid Yankee who has no idea what's going on in Texas, would have an understanding of what's actually going on where you've got Border Patrol. By the way, who are significantly Hispanic, okay? Border Patrol is about 70% Hispanic. I would invite any of these crazy levels. I would invite any of these crazy leftists, okay, to come sit down and for a day and go sit down with Border Patrol along the border. And allow me to get just a little fired up here for a second. When I'm watching Texans, okay, Texans get hurt. And I watch migrants get hurt. And I watch these leftists sitting in

their studios in New York City. And they pat themselves on the back for their compassion. And they sit there trying to preach to us about what they would do to secure the border. But they don't care about the little girl getting raped. They don't care about the little girl getting sold into the sex trafficking trade. Where are they when this is what is happening and when cartels have them under their thumb and are making them pay ransom because they're in a stash house in a basement in Houston, Texas, or in Del Rio, Texas? Because these people have no idea because they sit in their studios and they pontificate and they try to play the race card and they try to use that to divide us and to try to make everything about that instead of what's actually happening at the border, endangering human beings.

I can't, for the life of me, understand why we're allowing this to happen. I want to know, with all due respect to the leaders in our country, where are the men? Where are actual, honest to God, men who will stand up and say, we need to secure our country and protect the vulnerable? And by the way, how about not draft our daughters, maybe a subject for another day or for later? But where are the men in this country to stand up and to make sure that we protect our country, protect our communities, and stand up to protect migrants and people getting abused and not allow all these wailing and gnashing of teeth of these leftists sitting comfortably in their studios, drinking their lattes, and going around having people serve them while they wear masks and feel good about themselves.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. We do want to talk about on another day the drafting of the daughters because I do think that that indicates where we are as a country culturally, even morally, I would say. And it does kind of speak to the subject that we're talking about, though, because we're a country, we're no longer a serious country. We're not a country that is concerned with security and safety and actually wise policy. We're a country who is, it seems like, bent on its own destruction, bent on its own weakness, not just when it comes to border policy, but when it comes to foreign policy as well. And you said a word earlier in your first answer to the question that I asked that was very disturbing. You said purposeful. You said you believe that the Biden administration is purposeful.

its refusal to do its job and protect our border. But you just described a whole lot of destruction, not just for the citizens of this country, but also for the migrants that, of course, the Biden administration and the Democratic Party says that they care about a lot. Why do you believe that this is purposeful? Well, there's no other way to characterize when you have a policy that was working at holding flow to roughly 20,000 a month, right? Somewhere around 240,000 in the year last year, compared to today. where we've now had over 1.4 million, and we don't have September numbers yet.

There's no other way to characterize the choice, okay, the choice by the president and Secretary Mayorkas, and I assume supposed that borders are Kamala Harris, to choose not to enforce Title 42, and to choose not to use the migrant protection protocols to ensure that we can return to Mexico to stem the tide. Instead, they change those policies, They stopped fully using Title 42.

They're essentially going to acquiesce to judges on that front and leave our border wide open. There's no other way to interpret it other than purposeful. I believe that it's very much driven by politics, very much driven by their desire to say that it is only Democrats who can say that they're compassionate to brown people. That's what this is about, okay? This is about Democrats saying,

we are the ones who care for brown people, okay? Yeah. But go down to Laredo. Yeah. Go sit around the table like I have with, you know, people with Mexican heritage, with Hispanics in Laredo, who are, frankly, traditional Democrat voters who are moving hard to the Republican side because they're saying our communities are under assault. When I stood down there with a county judge in Webb County in Laredo with Senator Cruz two weeks ago, and I said, where is Joe Biden? And then he stood up and he said, yes, the congressman is right. Where is Joe Biden? Where is this administration while our families are struggling and why our communities are under assault?

What in Zapata County, which went for a Republican president for the first time since 1920, the mayor of McCallum is now a Republican. We are seeing a trend in the Rio Grande Valley. So I think Democrats are doing this at their peril, but I still believe they think that they can win this narrative by doing what they did yesterday, showing horse rains on a horse as whipping because they want to try to divide them. by race. Yep, they're so separated from the issue. I have a lot of people who listen to me, who are either they're married to Border Patrol agents, which like you said, the majority of them are Hispanic. And so a lot of these are Hispanic followers. I have a lot of people who listen to this

podcast who live at the border. And then I've got a lot of people who listen to this podcast whose family is from Mexico and still has family that lives in Mexico. And they can tell you, especially if that family lives along the border, how horrific it is, how the family there in Mexico, they're not saying this because of politics, but they know that it is an absolute clown show to use a nice word to describe it down there. It is dangerous. It is reckless. And again, these people who are living at the border, both in Mexico and in Texas, aren't your, you know, they're not your right-wing anti-immigrant evangelicals that the left likes to think that they are. They're people that are actually seeing their livelihoods and their lives put at risk because of an administration

that refuses to do its job. And you meant, oh, go ahead, go ahead. Then I want to be to reaction something. Yeah, I want to add one thing that 100 percent, everything you just said is exactly right. And one of the thing you just triggered in my head that a lot of people don't know about is the extent to which we are now allowing Mexico to get worse, to fall into a narco-terror state and the Northern Triangle, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Central America, to become worse because of brain drain, because of labor drain. The first lady of, I think it was Honduras, I can't remember which country, who came to the United States last year was saying, you're hurting our country with open borders, and we need to stop it. And here's why that matters

for your listeners. China is exploiting that. China is exploiting Mexico to send fentanyl to kill your kids. China is using the breakdown in the Western Hemisphere, in the lack of leadership by our country, to exploit that for their own game. So rather, than our country working with the rest of the countries in the Western Hemisphere to build an alliance of strong economic activity with a strong rule of law to combat China. We're giving China an avenue into harming us. That's what's going on right now, not to change the subject because it's all related. Yeah, definitely.

Definitely. Definitely. I think it's important for people to see that, that that's kind of how it fits into the bigger picture, at least one part of the bigger picture. This does weaken America. It weakens other parts of the world, and it makes the world worse. A weak America is bad for the world. A strong China is bad for the world, as we are seeing. Now, going back to what you were talking about, about, you know, liberals in their studios and tweeting and kind of being separated from this subject, we've got some of your fellow members of Congress that are, of course, tweeting about this, one of them being AOC. Now, people might remember that, A couple years ago, AOC and some of her friends had a photo op, a photo shoot down at the border, dressed in all white, holding on to some chain-linked fence and pretending to cry about what was going on to the border. I don't even know really what in the world she was trying to do.

For the past few months, she said basically nothing about what's going on at the border. This humanitarian crisis that we're seeing has been raging since Joe Biden took office. this hasn't just happened in the last couple of days. And the first time, at least since June, if not before that, that she's talked about anything happening at the border, the so-called kids in cages, the separation of families, which has still been happening, by the way. She tweets this yesterday. It doesn't matter if a Democrat or Republican is president.

Our immigration system is designed for cruelty into humanization of immigrants. Immigration should not be a crime. So I would say she's saying open borders. And its criminalization is a relatively recent. invention. What? This is a stain on our country and this is her retweeting that misleading picture of what she, I guess, assumes it's a Border Patrol agent whipping a person, which he's not at all. What's your reaction to that? Well, I can only hope that my colleague from New York maybe sold off her dress to pay for her Abolita's house. Yes. Oh, let's hope so. Poor Apolita.

I mean, look, AOC, colleague, I work with her. But let's just be honest, right? She was flat out lying with hyperbole in order to stir people up two years ago when she said kids in cages. These were structures set up by the previous administration, the Obama Biden administration, in order to create a facility when you had large numbers of people coming. Now, by the way, then Secretary Jay Johnson was lamenting. a thousand people a month at the time when they set these facilities up with the chain link barriers in order to have airflow and make sure that you could watch people and separate kids

from adults. So, and not just family adults. You don't know if it's their family. Okay, you want to keep them safe. You got a baby on your doorstep. What do you do? So fine. Now we have 7,000 people coming every single day, right? I mean, it's absolutely extraordinary. And so AOC was lying then. Now she ignores the fact that there are people piling up into these facilities, won't say anything about that. She went down to the border, you remember, tried about kids drinking out of toilets, which was a lie. I sent my chief to snap down there the very next day. We went to the facility. They were the same kind of structures that we have in all of our holding facilities where the toilet is connected to a water fountain. You're not drinking out of a toilet. She knows that. She was

lying. When she took that photo off wearing her white outfit, of course, didn't have any red lettering on it then. Her white outfit, when she was down there, she, she was down there, she There was nobody across the fence. Everybody down knows it was a total fake photo op. It was all marketing. So now she's nowhere to be seen in terms of actually trying to solve the problem. But then she'll make these grand statements about, well, any kind of an immigration is correct. It's nonsense.

A sovereign nation requires having a secure border for the good of its citizens and the citizens or the individuals who seek to come here. We allow over a million people a year to come in legally. But you cannot have a wide open border, particularly in a post-9-11 world, and particularly when you have a social welfare state, and particularly when you have a pandemic. You just can't do it. It's irresponsible. She would know that if she weren't pandering, trying to build up her use socialist utopia, while she'll destroy jobs, drive people into energy poverty, spend money we don't have, and leave our borders completely defenseless. Yep. Yep. And of course, no surprise, Ilhan Omar, Joy Reid, all said the same thing. I have one more question to ask. you. I want to play a quick clip of what's happening in what's called or under which the international bridge, I think it's called, on the border where there's like 10,000 Haitian migrants. I want to show people what that looks like. Okay. So what's going on? Why are there, I think it's a little over 12,000 Haitian migrants. How did they get here? Who helped them get here? Why are they? Why are they here? What's going on?

Well, best I can tell, and I've got a pretty good number of sources that I speak to on a regular basis. Jason Jones is a great guy. If you don't follow him, you all should. Todd went down and did some undercover research on all of this. And at the end of the day, what we understand is that the Haitians had moved to, in through Central America and or Southern Mexico. They had been aggregating in Southern Mexico for some period of time. They were held there, and the Mexican government was prohibiting them. from flowing up. And then it's magically on September 12th, all of a sudden those floodgates open.

Mexico decided we're going to let them go. And that's what then caused this migration from southern Mexico up to Del Rio. So that's how a large number of Haitian ended up. They've been aggregating over time in southern Mexico. And then they came up to Del Rio. Now we have 12,000 across the river. And once they've crossed the river, now they're trying to claim asylum status. and they've got to go through all the procedures of asylum status. If we don't apply Title 42 and return to Mexico as the Trump administration was doing, say, no, you can't do that. You can apply for asylum, but you're not going to come here, get released,

and we hope you return for your hearing. And so that's what we should be doing. But now we've got 10 or 12,000 there. The Biden administration, to some tiny degree of credit, is taking some of these migrants and putting them on an airplane and flying them back to Haiti. Now, that's causing some of the Haitians to go back to Mexico because they're a, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't want to go back to Haiti. So that's causing at least some pressure, but let's be honest. DPS, the Texas Department of Public Safety, has more people in Del Rio right now than Border Patrol.

Because we appropriated Texans $3 billion, and we have the DPS, Department of Public Safety, going down and doing the job of the federal government to try to secure our communities. And frankly, I think they should be applauded for it. Governor Abbott, the head of DPS, Steve McGrath, the whole team. I know them all well. We're going to probably have to go more, do further. We're probably going to need Texans to step up even more because it's our communities that are on the front lines. That's what's happening. And we've got to do something about it and give the Border Patrol the help they need. They are retiring. They are leaving. Their morale is low. They're not supported by this administration. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Congressman. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule. to talk to us. I know a lot of people are going to benefit from this conversation. So thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for what you do and look forward to coming on again. God bless. Thanks. Okay. So we kind of got the facts of everything that's going on. There's a lot more that we could talk about. There are so many numbers that we could go through on-accompanied minors, the numbers for fentanyl and trafficking and all of that stuff. But I think that the congressman gave you a really good picture and a lot of a lot of good material to kind of sift through and

trying to understand really what's going on and the facts really do matter. Unfortunately, what I anticipate is that there will be people, many of whom will be professing Christians who have not said anything about Biden pushing for, say, taxpayer-funded abortion or his commitment to dismantling the Texas abortion law, his insistence. upon boys and men being able to access female spaces in the name of like gender equity or something, his deadly negligence and callousness in Afghanistan, his ineffective and at times cruel COVID policy. And you haven't said anything about this crisis at the border that's been raging over the past few months that has led to all kinds of atrocities. Now I anticipate because there's a new narrative to latch on to, they're going to speak up.

And so they're going to see this picture decontextualized an angle that looks like something is happening that when you look at the other angle is not actually happening. We'll see them posting about Border Patrol under the direction of a Republican governor whipping black refugees when that is not true. But it won't matter. They'll post, you know, Exodus 22, 21, which says that you shouldn't oppress the foreigner. They'll say explicitly or implicitly how terrible and unjust America is and how racist America and the Republican Party are. So we've already gone over the fact about what's really going on at the border. But let's talk big theological, biblical picture here.

A country has the right to protect its borders. To be a country, you must have borders. Borders give a country sovereignty, the ability to have and enforce its own laws to protect the rights and safety of its people, every single country on earth. How's that right? Not just the United States, every country. It is very difficult to, and I don't think most people know this, but it is very difficult to legally immigrate and become a citizen of most countries. I was talking to a friend who immigrated from Zimbabwe, and she was telling me, you know, no one wants to move to Zimbabwe, but it's actually very difficult to immigrate there,

to become a citizen there. That is true of most countries. Even the countries that you think would what new people like poor countries. America is one of the easiest countries to illegally immigrate to and then stay illegally and receive all kinds of benefits paid for by the taxpayer. That does not happen in most countries. And you want to know who typically is angriest about that. Like if you talk to a legal immigrant, and I'm not speaking for all legal immigrants, of course, but a lot of the legal immigrants that I know, those of you who follow me have told me, and much harsher terms that I've heard from non-immigrants in this country, say how angry it makes you when someone curtails the legal process to try to just cross the border and come here illegally.

Every country. Every country has a right to enforce its borders, to maintain order at the border to deport illegal immigrants, and to disincentivize illegal immigration, whether it's Nigeria or Japan, Hungary, the United States, it doesn't matter. Every single country can't do this, and in my opinion should do this because doing so protects a nation's sovereignty, protects the rights, the safety, the prosperity, the culture of its own people, the people a government has the responsibility to protect. And before anyone gets upset by this word culture, there is not anything racial in that. I think that we've been made to believe, you know, by people who for some reason see the world

as racially black and white that that word culture is some. somehow racialized or racist, but it's not. And that's not what I mean at all. What I mean is that American culture is different than British culture. It's different than Australian culture. It's different than Bosnian culture. It's different than Mexican culture. It is good to love your country and your country's characteristics, your country's values, your foundational principles, your culture. And the people that you share those things with, this is not racial, especially in the United States. I have more in common with, for example, a Hispanic American than I do, for example, white Bulgarian and I care about America and I care more about

the well-being of America more than I do, the well-being of, say, Bulgaria. That doesn't mean that I don't love the people of Bulgaria or that I don't think that there are, you know, great people made in the image of God. It doesn't mean that you don't love people from other countries or that you don't appreciate their cultures. But what I am saying is that it is okay to love and appreciate your home more than you love and appreciate other people's homes. It's okay to want to protect the borders of your home and maintain its sovereignty and security. In fact, I would argue that is a way to seek the welfare of the nation in which God has purposely and providentially placed you and to love the neighbors next to whom God has placed you. C.S. Lewis talks about the love of country, the love of place,

and the culture of your country in his book The Four Loves. He writes this question. I think love for one's country means chiefly love for people who have a good deal in common with oneself, language, clothes, institutions, and in that is very like love of one's family or school. And it is good, because any natural help towards our spiritual duty of loving is good and God seems to build our higher loves round our merely natural impulses, sex, maternity, kinship, old acquaintance, etc. With this love for place, he says, there goes a love for the way of life for beer and tea and open fires, trains with compartments in

them, and an unarmed police force and all the rest of it. Of course, he's not talking about America here, and for the local dialect and for our native language. And he then references G.K. Chesterton and says something that I know and totally understand is hard on our modern day Western ears, but would be totally accepted in most parts of the world today and was acknowledged in the West back then. As C.S. Lewis says, as Chesterton says, a man's reasons for not wanting his country to be ruled by foreigners are very like his reasons for not wanting his house to be burned down because he could not even begin to enumerate all the things he would miss. Now, I'll be honest with you. That quote is hard for me to read. It's hard for me to say because it

sounds harsh and I really don't want it to seem like this is anti-immigrant in any way because it's not in the slightest. Some of the best, hardest working Americans, the most patriotic Americans, are immigrants. And it's also not to say Americans are inherently better than people from other countries because I obviously don't believe that. I simply think it is the responsibility of a government to protect its borders, to protect and prioritize the citizens of their country and to maintain that kind of national and cultural coherence. And I believe, again, that every single country in the world has that right and that responsibility. I believe the world is better when governments represent the best interests of their people.

And when people patriotically love their country and their culture, not in a way that is idolatrous, but in a way that is sane, in a way that is wise, in a way that is grateful to God for, again, purposely and providentially placing us in. every nation and every place that he has. So it is okay for Zimbabwean to love their country, to love their culture, to love their people and to not want, for example, Nigerians to come in and change those things. It is okay for me as an American to not want Swedes to come in and try to make America Sweden. I don't want to live in Sweden. I like America how it is. Well, I mean, there are plenty of things I could change, but I like the values on which America was founded.

I like a lot of American culture. I don't want to. it to become Sweden and that's okay. I believe God actually created us that way. Every country expects and is okay to expect the people who immigrate there to do so legally, to work hard, and to a certain degree, to varying degrees, assimilate. That doesn't mean not retaining any of their country's culture. America is extremely tolerant of that. And that's what part of makes this so awesomely unique. But it does mean embracing certain values like hard work, like liberty, like the rule of law here in the United States. America accepts more immigrants every year, by far, about a million legal immigrants every

year. So anyone who says this is some white supremacist, nationalistic hellscape with too strict border and immigration laws is just wrong. They're uninformed or misinformed about this. We are, at least right now, and in some prior administrations, I think way too lax when it comes to illegal immigration. incentivizing illegal immigration, as we talked about with Congressman Roy, causes the tragedies that we are seeing right now and that we have seen for a long time.

Sex and drug trafficking of children. Empowerment of the vicious, murderous drug cartels, huge upticks and crime in Texas and Mexican cities at the border, rampant sexual assault of women and children traveling from South America into the United States. It causes chaos. And that chaos is not good for anyone involved. It's not good for the countries that are being left. You heard Congressman Roy say the phrase brain drain.

So the people who leave those countries in South America, in Mexico, in places like Haiti, are the people who either have some means to leave or the people who have at least the mental and physical capacity to leave. So that means that the people who are left behind in these countries are the most vulnerable. That's true when it comes to not just illegal immigration, but mass migration in general. mass migration in general is not good for most people who are involved. It's not good for the people who are making the journey, which is hardest on women and children, children who are often smuggled, trafficked or abandoned. It may pay off when some of these illegal immigrants, you know, come in and the Biden administration is driving them into the interior of the United States to live

here without following the law. But it comes with a lot of risks. It is not good for the United States who will be paying for the social services for illegal immigrants who may be economically displaced and who, especially at the border, suffer the consequences of these crime searches. So without borders, you have no sovereignty or legitimacy as a nation. Without legitimacy, you have no rule of law. Without enforceable laws, you have no rights. Without rights, you have chaos and oppression and anarchy and injustice and corruption. I don't want that for my neighbors.

I don't want that for migrants or for immigrants or for. American citizens. We see the idea of nations as natural and good in scripture. Nowhere do we see God restrict nations or his nation of Israel from protecting their people or their borders. In fact, we see God demand the establishment of the nation of Israel accomplished through battle and conquest. Now, God certainly can't be said to be against advancing the interests of one's own nation. We just don't see. biblical support for that argument. God demands an access in Deuteronomy that Israel show kindness to the sojourner, as we so often hear from those who use these verses to say that America should have

open borders and accept anyone who wants to come in. But there are a couple of things I want to say to respond to that argument because I'm sure you've heard it too. Okay, so let me respond to this argument. one, America is not ancient Israel. And this verse that they typically quote is not meant to be the basis of immigration law. And the funny thing is a lot of people that use this to say, you know, this is what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to have open borders based on this particular verse. Well, they're the same people that call people like me Christian nationalist for just quoting the Bible, Psalm 139 when it comes to abortion or when it comes to different issues, even though I am not saying that the Bible lays the foundation of every single policy in the United

States. They think any Christian conservative is a Christian nationalist for a quote in the Bible when it comes to particular policy. But they love to decontextualize verses and say, you know, this is the basis for this government program or this is the basis for open borders. The reality is that sojourners in the Bible were more akin to legal immigrants than foreigners than foreigners were, God calls Israel to be kind to sojourners and for sojourners to assimilate. Now, one example of this is Leviticus 1715, and every person who eats what dies of itself or what is torn by beasts, whether he is a native or a sojourner, shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening, then he shall be clean.

So this is one example. if you're going to look to the Bible for inspiration for policy, which I'm okay with, even though I am not for living in a theocracy, because we see no biblical precedent for that. But if we want to look to the God who made justice for us to be able to determine what justice looks like here, I'm okay with that. But if you're going to say that a verse saying be kind to sojourners should establish our border policy or immigration policy, okay, well, then we're going to have to look at everything that God says about the sojourner. And one thing that God says repeatedly when he is giving laws to Israel is that

the sojourner, the foreigner, well, really the sojourner, more than the foreigner, has to assimilate. We see distinctions in the Old Testament between Israelites and foreigners in Leviticus 22, 25, Deuteronomy 1421, Deuteronomy 2320, Deuteronomy 17, 14 through 15. These are all examples of God drawing distinctions between foreigners and Israelites. So God distinguishes between the nation of Israel and sojourners and foreigners, and he has a distinct process in guidelines for how these people are to be treated. What we see throughout Scripture is that God is not a God of chaos. He's not a God of lawlessness. He's not a God of confusion, but he is a God of order. He has a God of parameters. He has a God of protective limitations and processes, not because

he needs the boundaries, but because we do, because I believe he created us that way. And again, this is not saying that America is ancient Israel because I don't believe that. I'm just saying, again, if we're going to look at a particular verse, let's look at the context. And if we're going to say, okay, this should be the inspiration for American policy when it comes to immigration, well, again, we need to look at everything that God actually says about the foreigner and the sojourner in the Old Testament. Now, God says that we are not to, supposed to oppress the sojourner. And there he's talking about a legal immigrant or something more like a legal immigrant in the Old Testament. He is not talking about oppression being,

protecting the border or enforcing the law. God created nations. They were his idea. They're a very good idea. They are meant for order. They are meant for protection. So here's what Deuteronomy 2619 says about Israel, quote, and that he will set you in praise and in fame and an honor high above all nations that he has made and that you shall be a people holy to the Lord your God as he promised. So all the nations that he has made. God made nations. Let me read you Acts 1726. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place. So the idea of earthly boundaries, a lot of dwelling places, for people is God's idea. This borderless world in which there are no distinct cultures or countries

lends itself to, again, I keep saying this word because I truly believe God hates it and I believe it's bad for humanity. It lends itself to chaos. It lends itself to strife and injustice because it goes against how God created human beings and the world to function, at least on this side of eternity. And on the other side of eternity, let me read you a part of Revelation seven, nine through ten. So this is God through John speaking. After this I looked and behold a great multitude that no one could number from every nation from all tribes and peoples and languages standing before the throne and before the lamb crying out with a loud voice, salvation belongs to our God. I mean, that is a beautiful picture of worship of Christ, where the church,

which is made up of all different kinds of people, will be united in our adoration of him. But even here, like we see that God through John distinguishes people by their nation, tribe, and people group. There is an acknowledgement of earthly distinctions, at least in his rendering and John's rendering of what he saw, even if those distinctions don't actually divide us in heaven. And again, I would say that America, that the role of the government is not to make America be like heaven. Like that's not what it that's not the role of the government. That's not what it's going to look like. That doesn't mean that we can't be united as a diverse people.

But what unites us in heaven will be the glory of God and our love for the glory of God. That is not meant to inform immigration policy here. And just a couple more things that I want to say about this before I close out. If we look at Romans chapter 13, for example, verse one talks about every person being subjected to governing authorities. And there is no authority except from God. They're supposed to be servants of God. Now, we know that we have to obey earthly authorities insofar as we are not caused to sin in the United States. We believe in a philosophy called the law is king. So the constitution actually is supposed to bind the authority of the people who are, quote,

in charge. And so when they go against the constitution, it is they who are disobeyed. obeying the authority that is supreme in the United States, not us, but we absolutely have laws against illegal entry. And so it is not right. It is not righteous to break that law. And it would also not be righteous for the United States to incentivize or enable the breaking of that law. It certainly wouldn't be biblical and it wouldn't be right for all of the other reasons that we listed and all of the consequences of enabling illegal immigration. Now, that doesn't mean that we should be intentionally cruel. We, of course, should have compassion for people as much as we can, but that shouldn't be

mutually exclusive with protecting our border. We also have to have compassion for the people who live here. I was against building a wall at some point. Now I actually think it can be a very effective strategy. We also see throughout scripture, I don't have time to read you all of the references today, but we see throughout scripture that walls are always a depiction of security. They're a depiction of wisdom. They're actually seen as a blessing in the Bible that when a country is safe and secure, when it has orderly processes, it's better, again, for everyone, not just the people in the country,

but also the people trying to come here. So our compassion that we have has to be paired with critical thinking. It has to be paired with knowledge. These knee-jerk reactions to decontextualized, misrepresenting pictures is not God glorifying because it's not truthful. All right. That's all I have time for today. I will see you back here tomorrow. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Alley, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase

narratives and we don't offer false comfort, we ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this T-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.