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Rep. Cuellar on border crisis: 'People have died and people are going to continue dying'


Rep. Henry Cuellar joined The National Desk Friday morning. (SBG)
Rep. Henry Cuellar joined The National Desk Friday morning. (SBG)
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WASHINGTON (SBG) - Texas has begun arresting illegal immigrants for trespassing, as a historic number of illegal immigrants cross the border with more than 1 million trying to enter the U.S in the past eight months.

According to the latest data released by Customs and Border Protection, 190,000 migrants crossed the border in June, a 5% increase from May.

“Just this last weekend in the Rio Grande Valley, they had 7,000 apprehensions over the weekend,” said Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar to The National Desk’s Jan Jeffcoat. “I can tell you this policy is not working and they better make some changes on this because otherwise, people are going to start dying. People have died and people are going to continue dying coming over to the U.S.”

The last time Rep. Cuellar joined The National Desk, he urged Vice President Kamala Harris to visit the border and see firsthand what is happening. VP Harris visited El Paso last month, in an attempt to address what she called the “root causes” of the border surge. But Rep. Cuellar says not much has been done to address the crisis.

“She was in El Paso. I wish she would have come down to the epicenter, which is the lower Rio Grande Valley,” said Rep. Cuellar. “If you don't show any repercussions, then people are going to continue to come. It becomes an incentive or a speed bump for people coming into the United States.”

The Department of Homeland Security tweeted this week that to decrease the spread of COVID and the Delta variant, the U.S. is “extending non-essential travel at our land and ferry crossing with Canada and Mexico through August 21.”

“This is what we see at the border, we see a contradiction,” said Rep. Cuellar. “We see hundreds and hundreds of thousands of undocumented aliens from Central America and from different parts of the world coming into the United States, but the legal visa holders that come in and spend over $19 billion from Mexico and billions of dollars from the Canadians and those folks, we won’t let them in unless they are tested and make sure that they're vaccinated.”

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