During an appearance over the weekend on the Fox News program Sunday Morning Futures with host Maria Bartiromo, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who recently visited the southern border amidst continued influxes of migrants, melodramatically insisted that the current border situation is the “worst that [he’s] ever seen it.” It’s difficult — at best — to seriously engage with Republicans like Cruz on serious subjects when they’re so committed to their fundamentally reality-disconnected ideology.
Cruz, for instance, certainly did not mention that the Trump administration could have prioritized building U.S. capacity to process migrants instead of putting up pointless stretches of so-called wall in the middle of the desert as some kind of monument to Trump’s ambition. Cruz said that around 100,000 migrants were apparently known to have crossed the border during February (and were either taken into custody or sent back, presumably), but he did not mention that these numbers are exactly on par with figures that were seen during 2019, when Trump was in power. Cruz is not operating in good faith.
As Cruz angrily put it:
‘We spent a day and a half down at the border, and I’ll tell you, it is bad. I’ve been to the border many, many times. It is the worst that I’ve ever seen it. It is a full-blown crisis… We went and toured the Biden cages. You know, for four years we heard Democrats and the media talking about kids in cages under President Trump. Joe Biden has built more cages, the cages are bigger, and they’re more full.’
Subsequently, Cruz pointed to apparent high rates of COVID-19 infections among migrants who are in custody, and his hypocrisy could hardly be more glaring. Cruz hasn’t exactly been at the forefront of any national or even state-wide efforts to take the pandemic seriously — but suddenly, when foreigners are involved, Cruz has transformed himself into a supposed champion of public health precautions, or something. He complained about the “real risk” of COVID-19 transmission among migrants — so where on earth was his concern about the “real risk” of transmission among Texans following Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s recent end to all COVID-19 restrictions in the state?
Subsequently, Cruz tried to use the stories of those who have been subjected to abuse by cartels and smugglers as a pawn for a political attack against the Biden administration. His gall is appalling — pretending like these same issues didn’t unfold when Trump was in power is cravenly deceptive.
Cruz angrily commented as follows:
‘Many Democrats like to pretend their open border policies are somehow humane. There is nothing humane about what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are doing at the border. They’re subjecting kids to horrific abuse. They’re endangering their lives in a pandemic by keeping them locked up in cages… and then they’re releasing illegal aliens into the United States who are testing positive for COVID at a rate seven-times higher than the U.S. population. This is a humanitarian crisis. It is a health crisis, and it’s a national security crisis.
Check out Cruz’s comments below:
