Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday attacked both the current and previous presidents for allowing the illegal immigration situation at the southern border to descend into chaos.
In an interview with ABC News, the Florida governor was asked about a proposal to send the military to protect the Mexican border and to engage, with violence if necessary, cartel drug-runners to regain control.
“They are killing our citizens. They are invading our country,” said DeSantis. “We have every right to hold them accountable and fight back.”
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When ABC’s left-wing reporter asked whether that would create a “recip[e for chaos,” DeSantis replied, “Right now is the recipe for chaos. … We have never had a more chaotic situation.”
DeSantis also predicted that President Joe Biden’s law border policies would allow terrorists to slip in and injure or kill Americans.
“As commander in chief, you have to defend your people. And you have to ensure the territorial integrity of your country,” DeSantis continued.
“Right now, the drug cartels are controlling parts of our border, more so than our own U.S. government. That will change when I become president. We’ll make sure we’re defending the country,” he added.
But Biden was not the only president that DeSantis lashed for being weak on the border.
On X (formerly Twitter), DeSantis War Room, the governor’s rapid response team, highlighted parts of former President Donald Trump’s failures to follow through on his get-touch border policies.
In one post, DWR played a clip of Trump bragging, “We deported a record number of illegal aliens” — “nearly 1 million.”
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Yet, the post added, “According to his own administration, Trump deported only 325,660 illegals — far fewer per year than [former President] Barack Obama. Why did he deport so few? As Trump said previously, he didn’t want to upset Democrats.”
DWR followed that with a June 2019 X post by Trump: “At the request of Democrats, I have delayed the Illegal Immigration Removal Process (Deportation) for two weeks to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border. If not, Deportations start!”
“After more than two years as president, Trump was still delaying deportations ‘at the request of Democrats,’” DWR posted.
Citing Trump’s post, DWR Director Christina Pushaw added, “’Two weeks to start the Deportations’ went about as well as ‘two weeks to stop the spread.’”
DWR continued the attack on Trump’s illegal immigration record by citing a December 2020 article by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
The report compared Trump to his immediate predecessors in deporting illegals from the interior of the country, because that is “much more under the president’s control” than turning people away at the border itself.
“The number of removals in the final year of the Trump administration is the lowest number since 2005 and the rate of removals is the lowest since Congress created ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] in 2003,” the article noted.
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Continuing, Cato added that under Obama, the U.S. booted an average of 155,311 illegals from the heart of America. President George W. Bush’s administration sent packing an average of 136,661 each year.
Yet Trump’s average was only 81,415 illegals a year.
“By any measure,” Cato noted in a quote used in DWR’s post, “the Trump administration failed to meaningfully increase immigration enforcement in the interior of the United States.”
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