After President Joe Biden was blasted for banning reporters from seeing the humanitarian crisis at the Texas-Mexico border, he is finally beginning to allow media into a southern Customs and Border Protection facility.
“President Biden should have listened to me sooner, but I’m glad he is listening now and letting press into the Donna [Texas] facility,” tweeted U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz on Tuesday afternoon. “Enough is enough. We need to address the border crisis.”
Cruz had been lambasting the president for allowing the rapidly worsening disaster and not allowing the public to see it.
“This past Thursday and Friday, eighteen of my Senate colleagues and I visited the border and witnessed firsthand the staggering public health and humanitarian crisis caused by your policies,” wrote Cruz Sunday in a letter to Biden. “We understand the heartbreaking tragedy unfolding at the border because we were there. We saw it. But the American people are unable to see it because you remain intent on keeping the media from shining a light on your administration’s failures.”
Since late January, Biden and his administration have been implementing policies to allow more illegal immigrants—including cartel members, sex traffickers, and criminals—into the country. On his inauguration day, Biden signed an executive order halting nearly all deportations (later deemed unlawful by a federal judge) and has since taken other actions to dismantle President Donald Trump’s border protections, including ending his Migrant Protection Protocols.
Biden’s decisions opened a flood of illegal immigration into the country. Just in February, Customs and Border Protection announced it encountered more than 100,000 migrants at the border, with Department of Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas saying recently that border crossings were on track to be the highest in 20 years.
Reports have also estimated more than 39,000 illegal immigrants have entered the country and have not been apprehended so far this year.
Furthermore, with the border unraveling in chaos and public detention facilities overrun, Biden’s administration recently and unprecedentedly banned the media from accessing the situation.
In his letter, Cruz described a glimpse of what he and his coworkers saw last week and what the media was not allowed to see.
“They could not show the American people what it looks like when a tent city built to house 250 children under COVID restrictions instead houses 4,200,” wrote Cruz. “They could not show the American people cages after cages of little boys lying side-by-side, of little girls lying side-by-side, covered with reflective emergency blankets with virtually no space between them. They could not see the playpen of infants and toddlers brought here by human traffickers and then left alone.”
Cruz continued that a staffer, a “political appointee sent by your administration,” tried to stop him from filming inside the facility and even threatened to kick the senators out.
“She threatened another senator that if he did not delete his pictures, the entire delegation would be kicked out and prevented from conducting our constitutional oversight role,” Cruz wrote.
He added the Biden administration also prevented cameras from joining the senators at the border patrol’s “makeshift processing center” set up underneath a highway bridge.
“At midnight, we saw hundreds of individuals, many of them infants, who had just crossed the Rio Grande under the control of cartel-affiliated smugglers, sitting on the ground between plastic construction fencing,” Cruz said. “Idling nearby were buses ready to release these individuals into the interior without appropriate COVID screening or assurances that any of these individuals will appear at a later date for an immigration hearing.”
“Biden’s immigration agenda swings the door wide open to allow already-deported, armed child-raping illegal aliens from Mexico onto Texas soil,” tweeted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton recently. Paxton has been active over the past two months, suing the Biden administration for their “unlawful and perilous” immigration decisions and saying Biden’s actions are “far worse than ‘kids in cages.’”
“We’ve seen what happens when you don’t secure the border…the negative consequences affect children, #Texas, and the rest of the country,” Paxton’s office tweeted recently. “And yet, for some reason the Biden administration wants to repeat all of that.”
Cruz rebuked the president for his harmful decisions and trying to cover up the consequences.
“The reporters and the cameras could not see any of this because you, President Biden, prevented it. I sent you a letter last week urging you to allow us to bring media with us. Not only did you refuse, you actively worked to prevent the American public from seeing what we saw,” Cruz wrote, adding that the past four presidents have all allowed media into the Department of Homeland Security facilities.
“Although some in the press remain uninterested in this crisis, many others are now recognizing that a humanitarian crisis is a humanitarian crisis no matter who sits in the Oval Office and are beginning to cover this critically important story,” Cruz concluded.
“I again urge you to stop denying reality, confront the consequences of your policies, and allow the media access to these facilities.”
According to Cruz’s latest tweet on Tuesday, though Biden is finally starting to do the latter part, he’s yet to address the former.
