Inside The Border Crisis
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All right, boys and girls, we are back with another edition of the Ben Domenech Podcast brought to you by Fox News. You can check out all of our podcasts at foxnewspodcast.com. I hope that you'll rate, review, and subscribe to this one and share it with a friend if you find it of interest. Today as my guest, I have Celine Rodriguez. She's the Assistant Director of Federal Affairs at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. She's someone who is very focused, obviously, on the very challenging issues of the federal

of border policy and the migrant crisis, which has taken over the airwaves and really been the focus for several months now of politicians, not just on the border, but in Washington and in major sanctuary cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In the past week, the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, went to Manhattan to give a speech to an event held by the Manhattan Institute, where he spoke to a number of the different concerned

being raised around his policy of busing migrants into the city, something that has resulted in massive ramifications for city social services, for Mayor Eric Adams and for other New York area politicians who have now developed, it seems, a far more concern about border policies than they had when they took office.

I spoke to Celine Rodriguez about this and other issues related to the politics of the migrant crisis in America at the moment and how it's changed over the past several years. Celine Rodriguez coming up next.

Celine Rodriguez, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Thank you for having me. So I wanted to talk to you about a number of different things that have played out over the past couple of months regarding border issues and really to get an update on where things stand.

I was in Manhattan just this past week to listen to Texas Governor Greg Abbott talk about the migrant crisis and really address, I think, a lot of the different questions that are coming out of New York City regarding the number of people who are being sent there and also sort of the situation down on the border, giving information.

an update, I think, to people in New York who've really started to pay more attention to this since he started his policy of busing migrants up on a fairly regular basis. One of the big points that he made, though, was that the migrants that are in New York City, while they attract such major media attention,

are, in terms of a percentage, coming to a very small degree from Texas, that essentially it's roughly about one out of every 10, you know, or even less, depending on some of the measures that are coming up there. And he made the point that, you know, these are all migrants who are actually requesting to go to New York City because they think, of course, they'll get

much better opportunities there or they have connections there than they would in, you know, staying in, you know, Southwest Texas or, you know, having to deal with, you know, a lot of the different challenges that are closer to the border. I'm curious as to your attitude toward that policy, how you think it's played out and what some of the ramifications have been in terms of the national media attention and political attention being paid to the migrant crisis that certainly seems to be heightened compared to where it was perhaps two years ago.

Right. And you would like my feedback on the policy to bus migrants from Texas to sanctuary cities. Yeah. Yeah. So as far as the narrative, Governor Abbott has really changed the narrative because a lot of these governors and these Democratic mayors came out at the beginning of this crisis.

While we were saying, hey, this is bad right now, but it's going to get a lot worse. And they said, well, we are a sanctuary city. We will accept migrants with open arms as many as they come. If this is where they want to be, then we will accept them in. Now we've seen as the governor has decided to allow migrants to choose if they want to go to those cities, then they can get on a bus on its way there.

And we have seen that these mayors and governors are not happy about it. We see that they are saying there's too many, that they can't sustain. Just the small numbers that they're having to deal with from the state of Texas, while Texas has taken in a significantly larger load of people that we also cannot sustain.

So if they're saying that they're a sanctuary city, yet they're saying that the border needs to be closed and that they can't take on anymore, what exactly are states like Texas and Arizona supposed to do with the millions that we're receiving in? You know, one of the critics said,

that have gone after some of these policies have said that essentially these governors, governors like primarily Governor Abbott, are using these migrants as political pawns. Could you speak to that? Just from their perspective, they're basically saying,

You know, they're using people as if they're sort of a political force when, you know, according to the governor, and this is one of the points that he made in his speech in Manhattan, he said, a lot of these migrants are people who wanted to end up in New York anyway and would have ended up in New York anyway. I'm just accelerating the process.

Right. So we've seen plenty of border reporters go down to where people are crossing and ask them, where are you coming from and where do you want to go? They'll say where they're from, which is countries all over the world. And a majority of them do say that their final destination is New York City.

Some of them say Los Angeles. Some of them say other northern cities. But for the most part, it is New York. And the governor is right. They do ask them, which city are you trying to go to? And they're not forced onto these buses. They have the option of where they want to go. Sometimes after migrants will make it to those destination cities, they'll say that's not their final destination. It was just the closest to where they want to go.

So that's just what we're doing. We can't sustain those types of numbers here. If we don't have the resources, but other cities that claim to be sanctuary cities say that they can, then how are we supposed to keep them here when they're saying that they could take them there?

You know, in the past, in the early 2000s in particular, and, you know, really stretching back for many decades, migrant issues related to the southern border were primarily a conversation about migrant workers, about single men coming across who wanted to work seasonal jobs, send money back home, and essentially go back and forth across the border, which is why issues like, obviously, guest worker legislation and things like that were such a topic.

you know, back 25 years ago. Now it seems to be a completely different population. And yet a lot of the politicians are still talking about it the same way. Talk about the populations that are coming across right now, some of the major countries that you're seeing represented and, you know, the ages and the units of people who are coming across versus where it might have been a few decades ago.

Right. So the answer to that is everyone from everywhere. We're seeing a lot more people saying that they're asylum seekers and the left does like to claim, hey, these are just your average asylum seekers. They deserve to be here. But there is still an asylum process that is in the books as U.S. law that has completely been decimated due to these policies.

Because of the incentives put under the Biden-Harris administration, people know that they can come. They can claim that they're seeking asylum. They can claim that they're LGBTQ and they will be led into the country. If they do get a court date, it's usually for 2027, 2028. So as long as these incentives are here, more people from across the country are going to continue to come. We've seen a record.

amount of family units, a record amount of single adult males, a record amount of unaccompanied children. It's literally everybody and it's all record-breaking numbers like we've never seen before. Lately, there's a large increase in people coming from China. I saw recently a report said that we've had the highest number ever coming from Middle Eastern countries than we've ever experienced.

So with these incentives in place, people will continue to come. They will get here. They will call their family and friends back home and say, hey, I got across. There was a warm bed, a cell phone and a bag of food and goodies. And they flew me exactly where I said I wanted to be flown to or bus to. And the wave will continue to come.

You know, in New York, obviously, they've installed a couple of different policies that have been trying to address this, some of which have been criticized by progressives and the left. Others have been criticized by the governor of the state, Kathy Hochul. But Mayor Eric Adams has said that one of the things in particular that he wants to deal with is the fact that New York City has a right to shelter law, one of the few that you see in any major U.S. city.

And that's something that extends backwards to some legal fights that they had many decades ago with lawyers who represented a class action suit by the homeless. In the state of, I mean, the city of New York, they're now trying to shift to a situation where

The shelters basically will only house you for 60 days before they push you out onto the street, something that really is of concern to a lot of people, especially headed into the winter. I'm curious as to your attitude toward these various sanctuary city policies as they're trying to kind of paper over the ramifications of the policies that they've embraced. What do you think these cities should be doing? What should these mayors be doing?

And should they be advocating publicly perhaps for reconsidering their status as sanctuary citizens?

Right. Well, first of all, right to shelter who? Because we've seen New York has had to shelter so many of the migrants that they're taking in. Now you have veterans coming out saying that they're going to be pushed out of their nursing homes. You've seen people who were homeless that had certain programs that are saying they've been given a notice to leave due to the influx of migrants. So who gets to determine who's more worthy of being sheltered? New York will run out of space. It's already happening. You can't just

get every hotel and every former school that you used to have and stuff it with migrants. So the idea of sanctuary cities, it's causing more crime. It's causing really the left to kind of have to wake up to their own policies and see, okay, this isn't working. You know, the New York governor, she said the other day, the border is too open right now. Meanwhile, the president is saying the border is not open. The secretary of

of Homeland Security is saying the border is not open. But as long as these sanctuary cities continue to take people in at the rate like New York has, then they're going to continue to come over. They're going to continue to take advantage of that. And New York is going to buckle under and run out of space.

Governor Abbott has obviously tried to deploy a number of different methods to discourage people from coming across through Operation Lone Star and other steps that he's taken. Talk to me a little bit about the methods that they've used to try to keep migrants out and the pushback that they've received, either from politicians or from people who are essentially trying to find ways around the different approaches that he's using.

Right. So Governor Abbott has taken steps that the state of Texas should have never been put in the first place. But he's doing everything that he can right now within his constitutional authority. The biggest thing we've seen in the news lately is the buoy barrier along the Rio Grande. People think that it's just the barrier. It's not. It's actually part of a three to four layer system. You've got the buoy barrier in the river and then you have the razor wire along the riverbanks and then you have the shipping containers along

And right there you have National Guard and Texas DPS with signs and megaphones telling people do not cross. This is dangerous. You could drown. You could lose your life. But Texas does not have the authority right now to deport. So our biggest thing that we need to take advantage of is the deterrence, making it a state criminal penalty to enter onto private property.

The expansion of Operation Lone Star, which has led to as a law enforcement operation, has been extremely successful. It's had over 400 million lethal doses of fentanyl have been seized, over 320, over 32,000, forgive me, criminal arrests. It's been incredible, the stats that Operation Lone Star has led to.

And the pushback is that a lot of people are saying that these policies are inhumane. But let's look at Eagle Pass, for example. They had a big push with the city council saying they didn't want Operation Lone Star happening, particularly near Shelby Park. They didn't want DPS arresting people for crossing over anymore. They didn't appreciate some of the vehicle bailouts anymore.

But then when we saw the search happen in Eagle Pass these past couple of weeks, they reinstated DPS's authority to arrest migrants that were crossing over into private property. The representative there himself came out against Operation Lone Star and then said he was very grateful for the quick response of DPS.

Texas DPS and National Guard. So while some people might be calling it inhumane, they're also the same people that demand that Texas does something as soon as there is a large influx, which takes up all of the resources in that local community, which tend to be very small along the border region.

Talk to me a little bit about some of the other effects that you've seen in terms of, you know, I know that we've seen footage. People have probably seen footage by now of the kind of car chases that happen coming out of this, the attempts to.

You know, get migrants to basically get through or around these various barriers. These are people who, you know, as opposed to those who are asylum seekers, want to escape detection and do not want to actually be caught. Tell me a little bit about the effect that that's having on local communities in Texas.

So I'm actually from Del Rio, Texas, which is right there along the border. My family, myself, we've all seen kind of all of these horrible things that come out of these open border policies. There are a lot of human smugglers that attempt to bring people from the border region further into the state and into the country. If it wasn't for Operation Lone Star, those smugglers would have never been intercepted. We would have never saved as many lives as we have saved.

from human smuggling if it wasn't for Operation Lone Star and Texas DPS, as well as other law enforcement agencies that have come in from other states. Florida troopers have stopped a great amount of human smuggling in the Brackettville area and other parts of Southwest Texas.

Those car chases, which they end up being sometimes, have resulted in loss of life for not only U.S. citizens, but also the migrants that are being victim to that human smuggling attempt. There's very, very often, almost daily, in places like Del Rio, Eagle Pass, El Paso, Brownsville, McAllen, they see car chases and vehicle bailouts where the driver will attempt to evade law enforcement. And that usually ends in some sort of

crash or rollover. We saw in Ozona, Texas, a grandmother and her granddaughter who were very young were killed. And the driver had, I think, 11 people that he was attempting to smuggle beyond the border. And it's very hard on these local communities. It's something that they can't sustain. It takes all of the

medical resources from that community that would otherwise go to local residents. I think it was near Brackettville a couple of years ago. There was a local resident who went into cardiac arrest and needed immediate medical care, but the resources in that county were so limited and they were aiding a migrant who had a heat injury on private property further away and they weren't able to get to her and she ended up losing her life to that.

So the effects on these smaller communities are big and large, but we also don't want all of these people who would have been victim to being smuggled and trafficked within the U.S. to be able to make it through. And we do see that we're stopping smugglers who are U.S. citizens and who are not. So it's both.

When in terms of payment, you know, obviously there's many stories of people who have paid the cartels with all of their life savings in order to make this type of track or to have the permission and the ability to get across. What are some of the other ways that the cartels extract payment from those who want the permission to be able to cross into America?

So they definitely take as much money as they can get from them. Once they get here, migrants are often extorted and told you're going to work whatever job we tell you to work. And they end up in labor or sex trafficking for as long as the cartels deem that they should be there on their journeys. It's very often that women, especially in children, are sexually assaulted here.

are raped along the journey. Sometimes they're just completely left to die. If they're deemed not useful anymore, they'll just take their money and whatever else they want from them and leave them along the trail. There's many ways that they end up having to pay the fee to get across. And those fees are very high. In Mexico, they're anywhere from a couple thousand to 8,000, sometimes 10,000. But the most we've seen is coming from China, where they pay around 50,000.

And for a lot of these people who don't have the money to pay those kinds of fees, they do end up being trafficked within the U.S. We've seen reports come out. There was a really great detailed New York Times article where they talked about the large increase in minors who are being trafficked in warehouses, especially in northern states.

So there's many ways, but the one thing is sure, the cartels will always get the piece of their pie that they want. You typically don't come over owing nothing. And in some way or another, you can guarantee that most of these migrants still owe money to the people who got them here. In terms of your perspective on what the Biden administration is doing, they have obviously made as much spin as they possibly can out of this at the White House.

claiming that the border is closed, that their policies are working, that the approach that is being advocated for by Governor Abbott is inhumane, as you mentioned before, and a number of other steps that

You know, what is being done to try to force them to live up to the obligations of enforcing the laws that are already on the books? Just given that, you know, and this is something that I've heard from a number of other guests I've talked to about this issue. The issue is not that the laws are not there. It's simply that the Biden administration is either choosing not to enforce them or that they are using such low standards when it comes to the asylum brief that it essentially allows anyone to claim it.

Right. Like you said, the laws are on the books. Either they're not being enforced or they're finding any loophole that they could try to find or they're simply changing the definition. For example, after the expiration of Title 42, they claimed that there was this large decrease in border apprehensions and encounters. That's not true. They funneled them through ports of entry. The numbers were still there. They were just claiming them as something else other than apprehensions. So that is a big thing.

An important thing to keep in mind is that before President Biden, every other president within the last few presidencies had taken steps to secure the border. And under President Trump, many people who work in Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrol will tell you that we had the most secure border we had ever had.

And now, you know, we've broken every number that there is to break, which is very unfortunate. And you have people like the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who refuses to answer any questions. Or instead, if she does take a question, she just diverts it and blames it on Republicans for some reason. But both parties are going to have to come together to find solutions on this one. Comprehensive immigration reform will not stop.

cure the current border crisis, though that is something that Congress should definitely deliberate on. That's not going to stop the flow of people coming across. What's going to stop is enforcing the laws on the book and in placing deterrence, which the state of Texas is trying to do right now. The Biden administration has

effectively teamed up with the corrupt Mexican government who is in line with the cartels right now. And it is the state of Texas against Mexico, the state of Texas against Washington, D.C. But we will not go down without a fight. We're definitely going to continue to do everything within our power and our constitutional authority to secure our state and therefore secure our nation. We're hoping to be able to get some legislation on the books that will allow us to go back to the Supreme Court

and challenge the wrongly decided Arizona v. United States. And hopefully from there, we can do a better job of making sure that our entire southern border is secure so that we can secure our entire nation. Yeah.

I want to close out with just sort of a philosophical question for you. One of the things that we actually saw under President Obama, you mentioned that under, you know, the previous presidents, there were efforts to hold to the border, is that President Obama actually had an extremely high level of deportations.

And that's something that was sort of frequently cited by people on the left and or I should say within the Democratic Party, more partisans than on the left as an idea that, oh, no, see, he does really care about this issue. That's why you see deportations being as high as they are.

What changed for the Democratic Party between the Obama era and the Biden era as it relates to the border? Because in the Obama era, that was something that they pointed to, particularly in the 2012 election, to rebut claims that they didn't care about border issues and the like. But now it seems to be something that...

The White House and the Democratic Party as a whole, with a handful of exceptions, mostly people who are from border states, seem to want to turn away and just not pay attention to something that's obviously changed in part thanks to this migrant busing approach, but still seems to be arguing against the larger portion of their party that seems to be of the mind that this is all fine and good. Just tell me about the difference between the way things used to be and the way things are now.

Yeah, of course. And to add to that, as a senator, President Biden actually voted for the Secure Fence Act. He stated that he wanted more border wall. I think at one point he even called Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists and said that we need to make sure we are protecting ourselves from those criminals and rapists, as he said. So

The tone in that time was very different. I think there's a few things that play into that. One, the rise in social media, how easy it is for anybody to access information, whether that information be correct or incorrect at this point. You have kind of your culture war where people think that the most humane thing to do is just to let everybody in, not realizing that is the least humane.

humane thing to do, because now you're putting millions and hundreds of millions of lives at the hands of criminals, of coyotes, of smugglers, of human and drug traffickers. And on top of that, we don't know what the amount of gotaways who is in the country and what their intentions are.

So just people having more access to what's happening and being able to put their opinion out there more strongly. With the current culture war, there's a lot of pressure on both Republicans and Democrats to please their main base. And the Democrats are very great about their messaging. They've got the youth on a very strong hold. They've got great messaging tactics.

And they're able to use that in their favor. And these policies tend to favor them a lot more right now. It helps make sure that they maintain their voter base better.

But the facts haven't changed. Border security is still national security. Republicans and Democrats do agree with that at its core. There are Democrats in Washington, D.C. that are very much aware of what's happening at the border, and they're afraid of what the consequences are going to be, not even that far down the line. So we just have to make sure that we're also bringing as much light as we can be to these issues and being as truthful as we can as to what those consequences will be that we will end up facing.

I'll add something myself, because I know that you're, you know, sort of coming at this from the think tank perspective. It seems to me that politically what happened is any border security became identifiable as being a sort of direct line thing related to Donald Trump. And that's one of the things that happened thanks to the media coverage of the border during his tenure that took things like, you know, the family policies as it relates to, you know, making sure that

You know, the young kids who are traveling, for instance, with an adult male actually have a relationship to him and that they aren't, you know, sort of being used in order to claim asylum. They turned that into something that was inhumane. They turned, you know, the facilities into something that were inhumane, including facilities that had been destroyed.

built by the Obama administration and had the same kind of policies toward it. It seems to me that that kind of approach to covering border issues by the media on the scale that it was during that time is just a marked contrast to the way that they cover the issues today, where they really turn the other way. They don't even pay attention to it until something really scary happens and they have to, but then they push it off the main focus as quickly as possible.

CNN and MSNBC cared about the border, it seems like, for about four years and exactly four years of that. Selina, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Yeah, thank you for having me. It was great talking with you. More of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this. I want to speak for a moment just to this minor crisis that's gone on in Capitol Hill regarding the

The pulling of a fire alarm by Representative Jamal Bowman, you've probably seen the images of him doing this and the claims that he's made that he was attempting to open a door at the time as his justification for it. This was followed up by a lot of mockery from a lot of different corners and then also by some statements that he put out and then had to apologize for it.

put out by his own press team to the Democratic press secretaries via email that included calls for the Republican Party to focus more on the Nazis in their midst, as opposed to minor issues like whether he had tried to stall a vote by pulling this fire alarm. I think this is indicative of something that people need to respect about the current moment that we're in.

There's nothing that I think really can tell people as much about the nature of our current representation as to look at an incident like this. First off,

It's underhanded. Anybody who knows how these doors work and has been around Washington for any amount of time knows that pulling a fire alarm on the side of a wall is not going to open a door for you or and certainly runs the risk of setting off a fire alarm that can force the evacuation of buildings and the like. Everyone knows this, especially someone like Bowman, who in the past has worked with a number of different public schools.

This is also a situation where I think, you know, the assessment of a lot of members is that they can get away with things like this and not have to deal with the ramifications of it, especially in this case, pulling off a stunt to try to slow down a vote that was needing to happen in a speedy fashion in order to avoid a scheduled government shutdown.

But there's something else that's going on here, too. It's kind of an indication that when it comes to the people that we're sending to Washington these days, they're really incapable showmen. They're people who

are much more used to yelling and screaming. And that's the kind of thing that Jamal Bowman has done in the past, directed toward Republicans like Thomas Massey and in an incident that went viral a while back. That's the sort of thing that they're used to as a regular demand of the job. It's not about legislating.

It's not about actually getting anything done. It's not about being serious in the process. It's not about being patient with the process. It's just about being a showman and a hype machine for your side of the aisle.

This is something obviously that I brought up before, but I think that we should respect that this isn't just something to make fun of. Oh, look, it's a politician doing something stupid and trying to get away with it. It's something that is actually an indictment of the fact that we keep sending these types of people to Washington expecting things to change.

As long as these types of folks who are engaged not in the practice of legislating, the practice of any kind of serious representation, are being sent to Washington on either side, meaning people who are hype machines on the right or people who are hype machines on the left.

you're going to end up with bad aspects of policy, poor attention being paid to what's actually going on, slapdash steps that are passed in the dead of night or that

have to be cobbled together by lobbyists and overworked staffers and, you know, really don't end up doing the kind of things that the American people keep demanding that Congress do. And instead, they'll just distract you with more hype one way or the other, with more animosity and with more of the kind of pointless, ridiculous showmanship of things like this. It's

It's always a stunt. It's a stunt when the left does it. It's a stunt when the right, to a lesser degree, does it. But it's something that I think we need to recognize as a fundamental problem with the way that our current representative policy works. Until that changes, until we reach a point where you have a much greater opportunity

and a much more significant percentage of people who actually want to be there to do their jobs, as opposed to just being in this fight and being essentially glorified commentators wearing American flag pins on their blazers.

then nothing is actually going to change. And, you know, I think that that's something that people should really look inwardly to understand and outwardly to recognize when there are people who come along who represent something different than just stroking the kinds of egos of the people who are on their side and stoking the types of war that they would like to see with people on the other.

I'm Ben Domenech. You've been listening to another edition of the Ben Domenech Podcast. We will be back next week with more to dive back into the free. Listen ad-free with a Fox News Podcast Plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music App.

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