Obama's DHS secretary admits border surge is a 'crisis on multiple levels'
Former DHS secretary under Obama, Jeh Johnson, joined 'Fox & Friends' to discuss his take on the magnitude of the southern border crisis and what he believes some of the solutions are.
Former President Obama's Homeland Security chief warned Thursday the border crisis has spread "nationwide" as sanctuary cities battle migrant crime and other consequences of the surge across the country.
Former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson admitted the influx of illegal immigrants at the southern border has yielded a "hemispheric shift" in "multiple places."
"We had 250,000 apprehensions in one month my second year in office, we had 315,000 apprehensions in all of the year 2015," Johnson told "FOX & Friends." "Just for some perspective here. I understand the numbers have dropped a bit of late, but longer-term big picture, this is a hemispheric shift northward. It's a crisis on multiple levels in multiple places."
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President Biden and former President Trump are set to hold dueling border visits in Texas on Thursday, with the former president visiting Eagle Pass, and Biden traveling to Brownsville as the issue remains critical for voters ahead of November.
Biden is expected to use his trip to talk about the importance of passing the Senate's bipartisan border security agreement, the White House said, adding that the president will "reiterate his calls for Congressional Republicans to stop playing politics and to provide the funding needed for additional U.S. Border Patrol agents, more asylum officers, fentanyl detection technology and more."
Johnson expressed his support for the bipartisan legislation, urging lawmakers to pass the bill to mitigate the influx of migrants at the southern border.
"I like that bill. That is the strongest bipartisan pro-border security bill we've seen in a generation," he said. "It would be a tragedy if it slipped through our hands."
"We have a solution at hand… Let's embrace it. Let's vote on it. Let's get it done. I guarantee that if that legislation became law, the numbers would drop, because we've addressed the problem, and because people in Central and South America are seeing that we are addressing the problem."
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According to a Fox News analysis published last week, nearly 7.3 million migrants are known to have illegally crossed the southwest border since Biden took office.
That number is greater than the population of 36 individual states. It comes from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which has already reported 961,537 border encounters in the current fiscal year, which runs from October through September. If the current pace of illegal immigration does not slow down, fiscal 2024 will break last year's record of 2,475,669 southwest border encounters — a number that exceeds the population of New Mexico, a border state.
The total number of southwest land border encounters since Biden assumed office in 2021 is 7,298,486, CBP data shows.
"It's a crisis on the southern border in Texas, in Arizona, and it's a crisis here in midtown Manhattan, just a few blocks away," Johnson said. "You can see migrants by the Roosevelt Hotel, on the subways at Times Square. This is extended nationwide. Now, the issue is, what do we do about it? Do we continue to play politics and scream about this issue or do we fix the problem? There are solutions to this problem, but given our politics, they become politically unobtainable solutions."
"In my view, the legislation that James Lankford, the very conservative James Lankford, Chris Murphy and Kyrsten Sinema negotiated is a good bill and would fix this problem… on a number of levels," he continued. "I guarantee… that if those provisions become law, the numbers will drop. The question is what are our politicians in Washington… going to do about this? Are they going to adopt this hard-fought compromise, or are we going to just continue to complain about the problem?"
Fox News' Danielle Wallace, Peter Doocy, Kellianne Jones, Bill Melugin and Chris Pandolfo contributed to this report.
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