Sen. Cruz: The Crisis at the South Border Is the Worst I’ve Ever Seen

HOUSTON, Texas - U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) today appeared on Fox News' ‘Sunday Morning Futures' to discuss what he saw after leading a group of 18 his Senate colleagues to visit the border. Watch Sen. Cruz's full interview with Maria Bartiromo here. Key excerpts are included below.

WATCH: Cruz on Fox Discusses Recent Border Tour & Heartbreaking Realities of the Crisis President Biden Created

On what he saw touring the Donna U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facility, Sen. Cruz said:

"We spent a day and a half down at the border and I'll tell you, it is bad. I've been to the border many, many times. It is the worst that I've ever seen it. It is a full-blown crisis. Last month - the month of February - we had over 100,000 illegal aliens crossing over. Roughly 30,000 of them were unaccompanied minors - kids. Just today, the Biden administration has over 16,000 children in custody. [...] You saw in these cages, children - little boys and little girls - side by side. They're not six feet apart. They're not three feet apart. They're not even six inches apart. They're lying on the floor. There are no beds. They're lying on the floor side by side. They're covered with aluminum foil emergency blankets in that facility that children there are testing positive for COVID at roughly a 10% rate."

On how President Biden's radical open borders agenda caused this crisis, Sen. Cruz added:

"I think there's three critical decisions that Joe Biden made in the first week as president. Number one, he immediately halted construction of the border wall. We saw sections of the border wall where literally, they're half done and there's rusted rebar everywhere. They just left it. They just left it with holes in it, and of course, the illegal traffic is streaming through those holes. Number two, Joe Biden reinstated the failed catch and release policy. In other words, when someone is caught, they end up getting being given a court date sometime in the future, released, and everyone knows, a very small percentage of them ever show up again. And number three -and this was probably the most inexplicable - Biden ended the remain in Mexico agreement. This was an incredible agreement that President Trump negotiated with the nation of Mexico. The government of Mexico agreed that those people from Central America traveling illegally through Mexico would remain in Mexico while they had asylum cases proceeding in the United States. When that was put in place, it worked. We saw the numbers drop."

On President Biden's refusal to address this crisis, Sen. Cruz said:

"Nobody is heading this. The problem for Democrats - they start from a premise that the more illegal immigration we have the better. They believe if you let all the illegal immigrants in, and then you make them all citizens that they will eventually vote Democrat and keep Democrats in power. But they also don't understand incentives. So, you hear Jen Psaki saying, ‘well we're just not going to keep kids' - which is of course a lie - because there are 16,000 Kids in Biden cages right now. But they don't get the incentives that when they announce, ‘any child that comes can stay,' - that we will see it's projected over 100,000 unaccompanied minors will come in."

Read more about Sen. Cruz's trip to the border here.

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