To watch the interview, click here or the image above.


WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Ranking Member on the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, today joined “America Reports” on Fox News to discuss the crisis at the southern border, and the letter she wrote to the Government Accountability Office asking for a review of President Biden’s unlawful suspension of border wall funding and construction. Senator Capito’s letter, which 39 of her Senate colleagues signed onto, can be found here.

HIGHLIGHTS:

ON WHITE HOUSE’S BORDER MESSAGE: “The president’s original statement when he first became president was ‘we’re not going to turn anybody away for the first 100 days.’ That message has obviously been received and that is the pull into our country by these traffickers and coyotes for these younger people. I thought the president sounded very weak when he said ‘don’t come but we’re going to provide for you later.’ I think deterrence is a strategy and I think a strong border deterrence will absolutely disrupt the numbers that are coming across and disrupt this trafficking that we see that’s really very tragic.”

ON URGENCY OF SITUATION: “The American people are a lot smarter than this. They know what’s going on. They see the numbers. They see the images…transparency is the best pathway forward to getting good policy and to being honest with the American people. This is a crisis. If you want to get hung up in semantics, why are you sending FEMA down there, which is an emergency agency? I think the administration would be better to use the terminology that everybody understands: it is a border crisis. We need to fix this problem with deterrence, with better policies, and without this open-door policy to where you’re telling people ‘don’t come’ but then at the same time you’re saying ‘I didn’t really mean that.’ The policies they have in place at the border are encouraging people and that’s what we see… I’m a compassionate person myself. I hate to see these children put in this situation, trafficked all the way through other countries. Who knows what they’re going through?”

ON PRESIDENT BIDEN HALTING PREVIOUSLY APPROVED BORDER WALL FUNDING: “We’ve written to the GAO to ask them to determine the legality of what the president has done by suspending construction dollars for the wall. We passed as a Congress $1.275 billion in wall construction funding in the 2021 appropriations cycle. That is the will of Congress, the will of the people. That’s a border system too, that’s not just fencing, it’s all the innovations that we have to try to disrupt the flow. A lot of this is replacement wall as well. The replacement walls come down, the president issues the order to say stop, and now we have all these incomplete projects. We also have more people flooding across. We have walls up with no gates. It’s an untenable situation. Plus we don’t have the technology moving forward that could really help the wall situation become much bigger, greater, and much more sophisticated in terms of detecting folks that are coming in.”

ON WHETHER THE ADMINISTATION WILL TAKE SUSBSTANTIVE ACTION: “I think all indications are no. The only way they are stepping up is to expand the amount of shelters that the children can go to. The existing shelters are at 200, 300, and 400 percent capacity. That’s an unsafe, untenable, and outrageous situation…if you start building more shelters, more people are going to come. We’re also hitting peak season. We know as we look at these numbers from year to year, once you hit spring into early summer, the numbers always go up so I expect them to go up exponentially, especially when the open arms of the Biden Administration come on in. It’s being heard in the northern triangle countries and all throughout Mexico.”

ON THE NEW ADMINISTRATION’S POLICY: “There was a system where you would stay in place in Mexico while your asylum was being heard, that was upended. Title 42, which keeps adults out because of the pandemic…that was upended…that’s why you see more children coming. I think the message here from the administration is ‘Come on In.’…what this is doing to the illegal drug trafficking that’s coming across our border – that hits every state very, very hard.”

ON UPCOMING BORDER TRIP: “I’m planning to go to the border on Friday to get a look myself in the El Paso region. I look forward to seeing that. I do think that we’re going to get to a combustible point where Republicans and Democrats are going to tell the administration ‘this has got to stop’ and you’ve got to find a better way to solve this problem. This has got to stop.”

ON ACCESSING FACILITIES: “I’ve had FEMA shelters constructed in my own state when we’ve had a massive flood. I had free and open access to talk to anybody who’s been in there. If you’re conducting your policies the way that are humane, and treating children the way they should be treated, which is what we all want, why wouldn’t you let people in? Yes, they should be allowed to go in. The more you try to hide, the more suspicious, the more the tensions become very untenable.”

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