Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was at the southern border late Thursday night and into Friday and encountered a situation he calls “horrifying.”
While on a midnight patrol with Border Patrol agents, Cruz encountered a group of about 20 illegal aliens in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. They had turned themselves in to Border Patrol, and the senator says he spent 40 minutes talking with the group that was mainly comprised of women and children.
“There was one little girl who’s 13 years old,” Cruz said during a press conference in Anzalduas Park, Texas, adding that the girl had “no family with her.”
“There was another little girl who was 16 years old. She had no family with her,” he said. “There was a little boy who was 15 years old. He had no family with him.”
Cruz said they asked the minors “about the violence they’d faced on the travel over—the look in those kids faces was horrifying.”
Cruz recounted a “disturbing” conversation with a 10-year-old girl standing in the back of the group with a “man who said he was her father with his arm draped forcefully around her,” adding that “it was obvious to anyone who’s ever seen a father and daughter that these two were not related.”
“At one point when we asked about her mother,” Cruz said, “we saw her look to the man who was claiming to be her dad, wondering what’s the answer supposed to be?”
On June 1, the Biden administration stopped DNA testing of families at the border, a move Cruz says proves that “Democrats don’t care if that 10-year-old girl is related to the adult man.”
In fiscal year 2023, Customs and Border Protection encountered 137,275 unaccompanied alien children at the southern border.
“I have a simple message for [President] Joe Biden and [Vice President] Kamala Harris, and every Democrat senator,” Cruz said, “come to the border, come to the Rio Grande Valley, come out on midnight patrol and look in the eyes of the little children who are suffering from these inhumane policies. This is horrific. This is wrong. And the people of South Texas know this is an utter disaster.”
Along America’s border with Mexico, CBP encountered 2,475,669 illegal aliens in fiscal year 2023, which is equivalent to 6,782 migrants a day and 96,725 more than in fiscal year 2022.
Data recently released by the House Judiciary Committee reveals that at least 3.8 million illegal aliens either have been released into the nation’s interior or successfully evaded the Border Patrol to enter the country since Biden took office Jan. 20, 2021.
Cruz says lawmakers have introduced multiple pieces of legislation to prevent migrants from entering the U.S. illegally, but “none of it will work… as long as you have a president of the United States who defies the law, who simply says, if you come to this country, we will let you go. That’s what’s caused this crisis.”
Virginia Allen is a senior news producer and podcast host for The Daily Signal. She is the co-host of “The Daily Signal Podcast” and “Problematic Women.” This first appeared in the Daily Signal.
