Former Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson warned about the nationwide impact of the border crisis caused by the surge of illegal immigrants, calling it a “hemispheric shift.”
President Biden and former President Trump are visiting the border in Texas, with Biden advocating for bipartisan border security legislation.
“We had 250,000 apprehensions in one month my second year in office, we had 315,000 apprehensions in all of the year 2015,” DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said. “Just for some perspective here. I understand the numbers have dropped a bit of late, but longer-term big picture, this is a hemispheric shift northward. It’s a crisis on multiple levels in multiple places.”
Johnson supports the bill as a solution to the crisis.
Nearly 7.3 million migrants have crossed the southwest border since Biden took office, prompting concerns about the escalating numbers and the need for effective solutions.
“I like that bill. That is the strongest bipartisan pro-border security bill we’ve seen in a generation,” Johnson said. “It would be a tragedy if it slipped through our hands.”
“We have a solution at hand… Let’s embrace it. Let’s vote on it. Let’s get it done. I guarantee that if that legislation became law, the numbers would drop, because we’ve addressed the problem, and because people in Central and South America are seeing that we are addressing the problem.”
“It’s a crisis on the southern border in Texas, in Arizona, and it’s a crisis here in midtown Manhattan, just a few blocks away,” Johnson said.
“You can see migrants by the Roosevelt Hotel, on the subways at Times Square. This is extended nationwide. Now, the issue is, what do we do about it? Do we continue to play politics and scream about this issue or do we fix the problem? There are solutions to this problem, but given our politics, they become politically unobtainable solutions.”
“In my view, the legislation that James Lankford, the very conservative James Lankford, Chris Murphy and Kyrsten Sinema negotiated is a good bill and would fix this problem… on a number of levels,” he added.
“I guarantee… that if those provisions become law, the numbers will drop. The question is what are our politicians in Washington… going to do about this? Are they going to adopt this hard-fought compromise, or are we going to just continue to complain about the problem?”
