Before a speech Monday from the Texas border town of Eagle Pass, the Florida governor viewed the southern border from a helicopter with a Fox News reporter and then criticized the porous nature of Trump’s wall.
“I was in Arizona the other day. You have like a wall, then it just stops,” he said, warning that the structure allows illegal entry for members of the Mexican drug cartels, who can “cut through the really fortified steel beams.”
“If someone were to break into your house to do something bad, you would respond forcefully. However, why don’t we do that on the southern border?” DeSantis said during a post-speech news conference. “If the cartels are breaking through the border wall, trying to get product into this country, they’re going to end up completely dead as a result of that bad decision and if you do it once, you won’t see it. never mess with our wall again.”
DeSantis ranks second in the polls, trailing Trump by double digits and watches the field expand into a crowd diluting his own standing. His speech indicated that he sees the border as an issue that hurts both Trump and Biden, while also appealing to their hardline supporters.
“What I’ve seen at the border is just humiliating as a country, that we can’t even enforce the territorial integrity of this nation,” DeSantis said in a speech designed to undermine Biden in one of his biggest political responsibilities.
He even seemed to agree with the prospect of declaring war on illegal immigration when asked by someone in the audience. “I think the state of Texas has the right to declare an invasion,” DeSantis said.
DeSantis said the «ruling class» in Washington, DC, is ignoring the spread of fentanyl in the United States, a problem he repeatedly blamed on illegal southern border crossings.
And he promised to use executive authority to crack down on border crossings.
Public surveys have shown Voters are concerned about Biden’s handling of the border, an issue exacerbated by the end of a Covid era politics restrict the entry of immigrants into the country. A Global Strategy Group poll released in April found that 58 percent of voters in seven battleground states said they disapproved of the way the White House is handling the issue, compared with just 32 percent who supported the president.
DeSantis expects the issue to be just as problematic for his main Republican competitor. Trump ran in 2016 on the mantra of building a wall along the US-Mexico border, but the structure was not completed, something DeSantis, who trails Trump in the polls, has seized on as he crisscrossed the states. of early voting in the country.
Trump’s MAGA PAC issued a scathing statement ahead of DeSantis’s speech, beginning with a tweet DeSantis posted in 2021 applauding Trump’s border policies.
“President Trump secured the United States border, just ask Ron DeSantis,” the statement read.
The statement outlined Trump’s own border policies, including a promise to issue an executive order ending the automatic citizenship policy for children of US-born parents who do not live here legally, and would «build even more wall frontier».
Democrats criticized DeSantis, who has sent people across the border from Florida to fancy parts of New York and California as he prepared for his presidential bid, and again after testifying.
“Ron DeSantis has repeatedly used young children and families as pawns in his superficial political stunts to please the MAGA base,” said Democratic National Committee spokesman Ammar Moussa. “This latest plan is more of the same: political gimmicks that are simply an echo of the same callous and callous Trump administration policies that broke our immigration system.”
DeSantis, who represents a state with a large Latin American population, routinely worries about speaking out about people who cross the border who are not of South or Central American descent. On Monday he warned people crossing the border from china and Tajikistan, as well as those on terrorist watch lists.