The Daily Signal - Why Homeland Security Chief Faces Impeachment for Biden's Border Crisis

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

The crisis at the southern border is likely to get worse because of the Biden administration's mishandling, or abandonment, of enforcement tools to stop illegal immigration. Last week, The Daily Signal was on the ground in South Texas interviewing border security experts. One is Mike Salinas, a 34-year veteran of the Border Patrol who retired in 2021. Salinas talks about the escalating border crisis in Texas, how the situation is worse under Joe Biden than Barack Obama, and how social media companies help cartels recruit smugglers of drugs and people. Also joining today's episode of "The Daily Signal Podcast" is Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports enforcement of immigration laws and opposes amnesty. Krikorian's organization organized the border tour, in which The Daily Signal participated. Krikorian, author of the books "The New Case against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal" and "How Obama is Transforming America Through Immigration," talks about how Biden and his homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, have failed to address the border crisis.  Also on today's show, we cover these stories: Can a Christian flag be flown outside Boston City hall? Yes, the Supreme Court rules unanimously. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., has plans for President Biden’s new disinformation board. Amazon announces that it will reimburse employees up to $4,000 in travel costs for medical treatments, including abortions.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, May 3rd. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Doug Blair. Our colleague Fred Lucas recently took a trip down to the southern border to talk with people whose lives are being affected right now by illegal immigration. He went down there to see just how the Border Patrol is attempting to handle those things. And we're actually going to air two of those conversations with you today. We hope you enjoy. But before we get to Fred's conversations from the border, let's go ahead and hit our top news stories of the day.

Can a Christian flag be flown outside Boston's City Hall? The Supreme Court answered that question Monday with a resounding yes. There are three flagpoles outside City Hall in Boston. Two are used for the American flag and the Massachusetts State flag. But the third is reserved for private organizations and groups to use when they conduct events in front of Boston City Hall. For over a decade, the city has approved 200 and 8.000. 84 flag-raising events, according to NBC News. Then a Christian organization called Camp Constitution asked for the Christian flag to be flown

in front of City Hall during an event that included clergy-giving speeches on the city's history. The city turned the group down, saying flying the Christian flag would equate to state endorsement of Christianity. Camp Constitution filed a lawsuit in response, and the justices ruled unanimously on Monday that the religious group should be allowed to fly the Christian flag, just like any other organization. The justices determined that the case was a matter of free speech since the third flagpole is used as a public forum. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the majority opinion and said when a government does not speak for itself, it may not exclude speech based on religious viewpoint. Senator Josh Hawley has plans for President Biden's recently announced

Disinformation Board. On Monday, the Republican from Missouri retweeted an article from Fox News about Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Majorcas admitting he could have described the purpose of the new board better. Holly added in his tweet, there's no confusion over the Biden Disinformation Board. Everyone understands exactly what it is, a censorship committee to punish free speech. Dissolve it now. Later, Holly tweeted, if Joe Biden won't dissolve his unconstitutional disinformation board, Congress should. I will introduce legislation this week to eliminate the board and forbid the government ever to create another one. It's time to stand up for free speech.

Mayorkas has claimed that the board is necessary to combat misinformation from geopolitical foes like China or Iran. Amazon supports abortion. The trillion-dollar company told its employees on Monday that it will reimburse staff members up to $4,000 for travel costs for medical treatments. including abortions. The announcement comes as the Supreme Court is set to rule on the Dobbs case this June, which could overturn Roe v. Wade. Some conservative states have already put laws in place to limit or ban abortion altogether if Roe v. Wade is overturned, while states like California have said that they will continue open access to abortion, even welcoming abortion tourism. Amazon's new policy is effective retroactively for all of this year. Employees are are eligible for the travel funds if the treatment that they are seeking is not available

within 100 miles of where they live. Now stay tuned for Fred's conversations from the southern border. At the Heritage Foundation, we believe voting is a sacred duty. It's how people express what course they want our nation to take. Given the importance of the ballot box, it's necessary to have a transparent and fraud-free system that can be trusted. This is why Heritage created the Election Integrity Scorecard. The scorecard compares the laws and regulations for elections state to state and ranks them on their security and transparency.

Check out the election integrity scorecard at heritage.org slash election scorecard. This is Fred Lucas with the Daily Signal and I was at the South Texas border last week where I interviewed several people, two of those which we're going to play today. First, we're going to start with Mike Salinas. He is a retired 34-year veteran of the Border Patrol. where he saw the front lines there in South Texas. He retired in 2021. He talked to the Daily Signal about the escalating border crisis in Texas, how it's worse under the Biden administration than even the Obama administration,

and the role that social media companies have played in facilitating the cartels. Could you talk a little bit about the situation with the cartels and the groups you come across on the border? Basically, the number of people who surrender for catching release, Is that a major distraction from catching the cartels? Absolutely, absolutely, because it takes away your power to actually patrol the river in areas that are known for illicit narcotics and the people that don't want to get caught. So the family units, the ones that want to get caught,

claiming asylum supposedly claiming persecution, takes away from all the other law enforcement actions that should be taking place because it requires a lot of manpower, manpower intensive because of the size of the groups. Once you get past that 10, 15 turns into 100 and sometimes larger groups than that. So that takes away all your manpower. Therefore, everything to your east and your west is wide open with nobody to, nobody to patrol that area or to respond. And you mentioned that you have in some cases graduates in like poor areas that they're working for these cartels. Because you talk about that a little bit.

Sure. They tend to recruit a lot, the younger crowd, because they know that the young kids are going to avoid prosecution. Regardless if they have aliens or if they have narcotics as juveniles. Some of them we've encountered in the past folks that or young kids that had just. graduated. I guess they're not going to college. They got recruited and now they're running either undocumented alien loads or narcotic loads. And these are American kids. Yes, sir. Absolutely. American kids. U.S. citizen kids. How big of a problem is social media in this? Well, they play a big role because that's how they do their recruiting. Snapchat, WhatsApp,

you name it. All the social media platforms are being used to recruit these folks. And it's not, It's not always just the young kids. It's just folks that want to make a quick buck, actually. And in terms of the morale for the Border Patrol, since how much has it changed from the Trump administration to the Biden administration? It's changed a lot because now most of the time, most of the interaction with the agents is right at your muster at the beginning of the shift. And that's it.

After that, you're pretty much caught with either transporting, sitting, prepping these people for for pickup making sure that everybody searched you know separated by female male family unit you name it to make the process easier to get them back to the station and then get them to the processing centers okay all right and um yeah we touched on this before but uh and what how many ways has Biden been worse than Obama well in what in what ways has but he'd been worse than Obama. Well, pretty much, I don't think, I really don't think Obama says, hey, come on over.

We're going to end everything. Just, I mean, he did, through executive order, I believe, DACA and DAPA, okay, that brought, you know, that brought some folks in. But when you just say, you know what, you know, in so many words, the border's wide open, come on over. So it's been twice as bad. So at least we had some, we had some ability, you know,

even it's just, it just wasn't as bad, you know. but the Biden administration sure has, you know, put a damper on operations as far as border security is concerned. What was it, what has the propaganda been like south of the border since Biden has come in? Has it been pretty much you should be coming in? This is a time to do it. I really don't keep up with the Mexican news outlets, but I can guarantee you that they're, you know, cashing in on, or not cashing in, but making sure that the people that want to come or even didn't want to come say hey come on over they're they're giving you a cell phone now you know and now you now you have a second one because most everybody

has one nowadays whether they're coming from south america central america doesn't matter everybody's got a cell phone and um uh last question uh how big of a problem is title 42 going to be when that expires? Well, it's a CDC public health policy, so if it does end, it's going to bring even more chaos, I think. And pretty much, there's going to be nobody out in the field. I mean, they'll be out in the field, but there won't be patrolling, making sure that known areas of interest where, like I mentioned before,

where our narcotics are coming in, where most of the groups of folks that don't want to get caught are coming in, because they've been identified. The Border Patrol knows where they're at, but if they don't have access to it because they're stuck processing or prepping people for transport to processing centers, it takes away from all that. So you're just spinning your wheels.

All right. Well, thanks very much. No, thank you. Virginia Allen here. I want to tell you about the most popular. popular resource on the Heritage Foundation website, The Guide to the Constitution. More than 100 scholars have contributed to create a unique line-by-line analysis of our Constitution. The guide is intended to provide a brief and accurate explanation of each clause of the Constitution as envisioned by the framers and as applied in contemporary law. There has never been a more important time to

have an understanding of our founding document. So if you want to learn more about the Constitution, go ahead and visit heritage.org slash constitution or simply search for heritage guide to the Constitution. This is Fred Lucas again with the Daily Signal. I also spoke with Mark Corcorian, who has been the executive director of the Center for Immigration Study since 1995. He speaks with the Daily Signal about a recent border tour led by the CIS in South Texas. He also talks about the failure of President Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas to address the crisis. Mark, this has been the 10th border tour that the Center for Immigration Studies has done. At this tour, we've talked to a lot of property owners and gotten some real frontline stories about the effect of illegal immigration in this country.

Could you talk a little bit about what you've experienced in the big takeaways? the property owners we've heard from on this tour who live right on the border really have a similar perspective of property owners we've spoken to on the border and else you know other parts of the country Arizona for instance because they don't want strangers traipsing over their property I mean it's kind of what it amounts to and there's a whole bunch of reasons for that some of them are you know potentially fearful we spoke with an older woman who lives in lives alone, literally right on the border. And, you know, that's potentially kind of a scary situation, even if you weren't 100 yards from Mexico. And so when you add the immigration angle to it,

you know, it makes sense that this would be a, you know, something that people would really worry about and rightly worry about. And it's not so much that, you know, all the illegal aliens are coming to, you know, rape your daughters kind of nonsense. It's just that there are bad guys who come across the border. Smuggling dope, they're illegal aliens who don't want to turn themselves in. There's all kinds of

bad folks, and people living on the border don't want to be overwhelmed by that. One of the other people we met with was a farmer. Long, like seventh generation down here, his family has a Spanish land grant. So they go way back, sort of May

our descendant kind of thing except the equivalent of it down here. And he's gotten so fed up with this that he actually has come out of the closet as a Republican, which down here is kind of a big deal, you know. So we've seen this, I've seen this in, you know, all kinds of places along the border in New Mexico and Arizona and California. People who live on the border want order. They don't even necessarily all agree on immigration policy, but they all agree they want control, they want the border enforced, and they want people breaking the rules to be punished.

How much do you think attitudes have evolved on this issue in just recent years? I think that actually attitudes have hardened a lot because it used to be, and this is a while ago, immigration was just seen as a parochial issue for people in parts of Texas and California you to worry about. But now it's clear every state is a border state, every town is a border town. And even along the border attitudes have hardened because the illegal immigrant flow in the old days, number one, wasn't as big. Number two was all Mexican men coming to work on farms. This is a long time ago. And, you know, they just, it wasn't seen because it was smaller it was more familiar, it really wasn't seen as a threatening thing. That's not the case anymore.

Now, the sense of disorder. It's not even crime because one of the landowners we spoke with, that long-time resident seventh-generation person down here in the valley, he said, you know, no one's ever put a gun to his head. He's never been physically threatened, although he has had at least one run-in with some cartel folks. But that's not the issue. It's not so much crime, it's disorder. And that has really hardened attitudes. And that's one of the reasons down in South Texas, more and more people in an area where there literally were no Republicans before are now becoming Republican. Macallin, Texas, the big city down here is elected a Republican mayor for the first time. Almost certainly one of the Democrat congressional seats will be won by

a Hispanic woman, Republican, in November. Yeah, and one of the big points that people made is that, yeah, and you just talked about, alluded to here, as the nature of the illegal border crossing has changed, it's almost entirely cartel-driven now and trafficker driven now. That's true. Now, it's not that the illegals are all drug dealers, it's that the drug cartels control the Mexican side of the border. They have different turf wars over who controls what, but all the Mexican side. is all entirely controlled. And I don't mean controlled isn't they fill the potholes,

but they have a veto over who comes across the border into the U.S. illegally. And so the smuggling gangs, which are separate, have to pay a toll to these cartels. And the cartels use this. Not only do they make money off of this smuggling, they get their cut, basically, of the smuggling fees, which is almost free money for them,

and it's very low risk. but also the enormous flow of people basically invited by Joe Biden to turn themselves in and make phony baloney asylum claims as a way of being let go. That's an enormous flow. Those people come in groups of 50, 100, and 200 at a time to turn themselves in and essentially strip border patrol capacity from everywhere else along the border to deal with them, which means there are a whole whole. stretches of the border where nobody is watching. There may be cameras, but nobody can do anything about it. That's the real payoff for cartels. It enables them, it gives them almost free hand to bring stuff and maybe people who don't want to turn themselves in across the border because there's nobody watching. And talk about some of the things happening in Washington right now.

What's your anticipation about what will happen with Title 42? Title 42 was supposed to be lifted May 23rd. I wrote, I was on the record saying it ain't going to be lifted on May 20. There's no way. There are too many Democrats pushing back. Too many Democrats terrified of the consequences because, you know, the DHS itself, Biden's DHS was predicting a doubling or more of the flow across the border if they lifted Title 42. But it is going to be lifted at some point.

it was temporarily suspended by a federal judge. But, you know, it's a public health measure ostensibly. And so unless Congress intervenes and passes a law saying they can keep it in place and the president signs it, it just seems to me it's going to have to be lifted at some point because the president is also getting enormous pressure from this hard left. And when they do that, it's going to be bad news on the border. and it's going to be worse news for the Democratic Party because the more they keep delaying it, the closer and closer it gets to the election.

And I don't see how they can just keep kicking the can down the road till November. Maybe they can. I don't know. I've been wrong before. But this is, you know, this is potentially an extinction-level event for the high immigration, open borders, Democrats. And frankly, there's Republicans like that, too. So, you know, in a sense, in a kind of Leninist versus better sense, it might be good for them to lift Title 42, like, say, in August, so that the consequences can be fully clear by the time people have to make a decision about who should run Congress next year.

There was a letter from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus that called on Biden to expand documents. and take some other executive measures. And get rid of Title 42. Right. Yeah. I mean, would you anticipate Biden actually going there or do you think it would be such a clear potential political problem for him? It's a good question because there are two factions in the administration on this immigration issue. They both believe the same thing.

In other words, everybody in the administration wants basically amnesty for all the illegals and unlimited immigration in the future and all that stuff. It's not really at all a policy dispute. It's a political dispute. And the people like Ron Clayne and Susan Rice who are at least a little bit more in touch with reality, and that's sort of an improbable way to describe the chief of staff, frankly. Ron Claim is... Anyway, anybody who sort of compulsively retweets Jen Rubin

can't be that in touch with reality. But anyway, the point is they're more cautious politically. And so, but then everybody who's in charge of immigration policy are radicals. They're anti-borders radicals. So the question is which faction in the White House, the more cautious or the less cautious, will prevail? And I don't know that we can say. And, you know, that's part of the reason that it's unclear is that there's no one in charge. The president's not in charge of his administration.

Now, I'm not trying to say, you know, he's senile. and Alzheimer's and all that. But I mean, he's clearly lost cognitive capacity. But it's also clear as part of that that he's not really in charge. He's not in a position to say to one faction or the other, okay, I've heard you both out. This is what we're going to do. Make sure you do it.

And if you don't like it, please, there's the door. In other words, decisive executive action is simply not in the cards for this administration, as long as Biden is at the top because he's not in a position. to make a decision and make it stick. Secretary Marius had a rough time on Capitol Hill recently. Deservedly. There has been talk among advocates, members of Congress, of pushing impeachment against the Secretary.

Do you think that would be prudent? Is impeachment something that's usually reserved for corruption rather than lack of effectiveness? What you're thinking on it? I think it's pretty much guaranteed. Majoricus is going to be impeached by the House next year. Now, whether he'd be removed by the Senate, because it's the same process as any other impeachment, that's unclear.

It'll depend on the outcome of the elections and a lot of other things. But I think there's almost no doubt that the Judiciary Committee will vote in particles of impeachment. And I think it's pretty sure that the full House will, in fact, pass articles of impeachment, and he deserves it. because it's not a question of just corruption. It's not like he's on the take. I don't think he's, you know, money corrupt in any way. The problem is, though, that he is policy corrupt in a sense.

In other words, he took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the laws of the United States, and that ain't what he's doing. And, you know, there's all kinds of hotheads among Republicans who will say, well, we've got to impeach Biden and all this. Impeachment is a political process. it'd be a political error, I think, to go after Biden and even impeach him, who then Camilla Harris is president? I mean, that's even worse.

But Majorcas is an appropriate target for impeachment, because even though the administration has a policy and he's following it, you know, is precisely because the president is so weak and unable to exercise authority. and there are differing currents of opinion in the administration, Majorcas could be a lot tougher than he is. He could be actually following the law in a way that he's not doing. So I think it's not just, I used to think that if it wasn't Majorcas, anybody who's there would be doing exactly the same thing. And maybe that's true, but I don't think so. I think Majorcas, he actually has an influence over, at least at the margins,

over the way they're doing things, and he's choosing poorly in every instance, and he definitely should be removed from office. And this week, the Republican Attorney General, State Attorney Generals, filed suit against the department regarding a decision to move decisions away from immigration judges to the U.S.C.I.S. Federal agency, what's your thinking on that? Yeah, this was a regulation that was. issued and is clearly illegal. What they're trying to do is push the decision-making for asylum cases down from immigration

judges to bureaucrats at U.S. citizenship and immigration services. And they would change the way asylum is done or the decisions are made so that rather than in a court where the government could say, no, your honor to the immigration judge, you know, the claims of this person are false or whatever it is, The way they want to do it is a bureaucrat, many of whom are former social workers in the asylum corps. In fact, the head of it is a former social worker, literally. I'm not even using that as kind of an epithet. It wouldn't even be an adversarial arrangement.

It would just be an interview with this illegal immigrant claiming asylum, some story he'd been coached to tell by his smugglers or by his American immigration activists, who, quite frankly, I would not be surprised if they work with the smugglers. a conversation between that person and someone who wants to say yes and give this person an asylum. So the point of this new regulation basically is to rubber stamp asylum applications and radically increase the percentage you get it. Because a minority, a relatively small minority of asylum applicants actually succeed because there's a pretty high bar.

You have to prove persecution or what have you. The problem is that under the statute, these bureaucrats that you, USCIS, they're not authorized to give asylum. I mean, literally it is a violation of law. That's what the basis of this lawsuit is, I think. I haven't read the whole complaint. So it's important to the file this lawsuit, and I hope they prevail. I expect they will at least get a temporary restraining order until the case kind of works its way, and they do, you know, have hearings on the merits and what have you. All right. Well, thanks for joining us for this, and I really appreciate it. Anytime, happy to talk to Heritage.

And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to The Daily Signal Podcast. Be sure to take just a moment to subscribe to the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and IHeartRadio. And of course, please take a moment. Leave us a review, a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. We love to hear your feedback. Thanks again for listening, and we're back with you all tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation.

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