Tucker: Border crisis is completely ignored by the media
Fox News host Tucker Carlson details how border crisis has impacted El Paso, Texas on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
The contrast between El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico has always been one of the great advertisements for America and for the American way. The cities have a lot in common. They're literally right next to each other. They're separated by one of the narrowest stretches of the Rio Grande River by feet. From downtown El Paso, you can see downtown Juarez, and the populations are not that different.
Most people in El Paso have relatives in Mexico. The difference is one city is American and one is not. El Paso has always been tranquil and orderly, a really nice town with good schools and friendly people. You would move there. Juarez is terrifying, chaotic, impoverished and dangerous. In 2010, Juarez recorded more than 3,000 murders. In El Paso, just yards away, there were five.
On one side of the river, you had a high functioning civilization, ours, and on the other side you had the third world and the success of El Paso said everything about the superiority of the American system and American culture. But two years ago, Joe Biden set out to change that. It was an offense against equity. They were too different, but instead of fixing Juarez, he decided to destroy El Paso and make it much more like Juarez. To do that, the administration opened America's southern border to the world. No place in our country was hit harder by that decision than El Paso, Texas.
In the last year, illegal immigration into El Paso has risen by over 280% – undreds of thousands of foreign nationals streaming in, jobless, penniless, anonymous. What happened next? You know what happened next: the most predictable disaster in the world. Crime skyrocketed. Social cohesion collapsed. Test scores in local schools plummeted, and the city began to fall apart. People who grew up in El Paso started to leave in large numbers. This is what it looks like now:
REPUBLICANS, DEMOCRATS WARN END OF TITLE 42 WILL BRING IMMIGRATION DISASTER
Immigration is at the top of the ticket this November as a record number of illegal immigrants continue to cross the border. (John Moore/Getty Images)
BILL MELUGIN, FOX NEWS: It's a chilly December night in El Paso, Texas and these migrants are homeless, camping on the streets, preparing for a night of bitter cold after they were released from Border Patrol custody. The migrant surge also overwhelming local shelters as this unprecedented crisis seems headed for a potential breaking point with Title 42 set to drop next week and there is no reprieve coming as new Fox News video shows over 1,000 migrants camped at the border wall in El Paso last night waiting to be let in for processing after they crossed the Rio Grande illegally. CBP sources tell Fox News the El Paso sector has already seen over 139,000 migrant encounters since October 1. That's enough to fill up L.A. So-Fi Stadium twice and it reflects a 255% increase over the same time last year.
Imagine if that was your city – your city – where you work and raised your family, the city that you built and then one day some guy gets elected and decides to destroy it and the media ignores it. No one even covers it. Most Americans have no idea your city has been destroyed.
And it's not just downtown and the shelters. It's the airport, the window into El Paso. In case you haven't flown there recently, here's what it looks like. People seem to be camping on the floor of the place. Looks like the train station in post partition Calcutta, but at least they had a war to blame it on. There's no war in Texas except the war the White House declared on its own country. This footage comes from Katie Daviscourt of Rebel News and we'll talk to her in a moment.
KATIE DAVISCOURT: I just landed in El Paso and here at the airport is an influx of illegal immigrants sleeping on the bathroom floors. Take a look at what’s happening here in the airports.
DAVISCOURT: Where are you from?
MIGRANT: Peru
DAVISCOURT: Where are you from?
MIGRANT: Dominican Republican
DAVISCOURT: Where are you from?
MIGRANT: Colombia.
That's the airport. They're not waiting for flights. They're living there. And they're not from Mexico or even El Salvador and Guatemala. They're from, as you just heard, Colombia, Peru, the Dominican Republic, an island. These are countries thousands of miles away, to which we owe nothing. There is no reason for this. There are 7 million American men of working age who are not working. They're on the internet all day. They have nothing to do. And yet we're doing this. The mayor of El Paso, Oscar Leeser, has just declared a state of emergency and you can see why.
MAYOR OSCAR LEESER: We felt there was proper time today to call a state of emergency and the reason why we're doing it is because I said from the beginning that I would call it when I felt that either our asylum seekers or our community was not safe, and I really believe that today our asylum seekers are not safe as we have hundreds and hundreds on the streets.
El Paso wasn't like this just a few years ago. Ask anyone who went there. The question is, why isn't the state of Texas stopping this? Where's the Texas National Guard? A few months ago, Greg Abbott, the governor, was running for office. He was running against Beto O'Rourke, and he was willing to say anything to get re-elected. He was willing to lie and apparently he did. He said he'd deploy 10,000 troops to the border. Oh, but he hasn't. He just revised it to 5,000 troops. And then he came up with another solution: just bus thousands of migrants to other states, which is kind of funny. It makes for an amusing cable news segment. But it's still our country, isn't it? And none of these people are ever leaving.
This is an invasion of our country. We don't have a border and Greg Abbott could stop it, and he isn't. Why isn't the Texas National Guard stopping this? We can't answer that question. We'd love to have Greg Abbott come on and tell us.
But because Texas isn't securing the border, the rest of the country is also overrun with people from foreign countries who have no right to be here and whose identity we don't know. At exactly the moment, we do not need a larger population as our economy moves south. This is what Denver, Colorado, a long way from the border looks like now.
REPORTER: With several shelters already at capacity, Mayor Michael Hancock said more are needed to house migrants. More than 900 have arrived in Denver in the past several months. More coming every day.
MAYOR MICHAEL HANCOCK: So, let me be frank. This influx of migrants, the anticipated, anticipated nature of their arrival in our current space and staffing challenges, have put an immense strain on city resources to the level where they're on the verge of reaching a breaking point.
TEXAS BORDER PATROL FACILITY OVERWHELMED WITH ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS AS TITLE 42 EXPIRATION LOOMS
That's in Denver. Again, a long way from our southern border. This is the biggest story in recent American history, a total change in the American population, millions and millions and millions of new people. The country will never be what it was five years ago. Even if you're for this, you would acknowledge this is a big deal and it's completely ignored by the media, except when they are forced to respond, and they tell you to shut up and stop complaining.
On ABC News, someone called Martha Raddatz argued that actually it's people who are against immigration who are to blame for the immigration crisis because they're talking about it and therefore advertising it to the rest of the world. Watch this.
MARTHA RADDATZ TO TEXAS GOV. GREG ABBOTT: You talk about the border wall. You talk about open borders. I don't think I've ever heard President Biden say, "We have an open border. Come on over." but people I have heard it for you are former President Trump or Ron DeSantis. That message reverberates in Mexico and beyond. So, they do get the message that it is an open border and smugglers use all those kinds of statements.
You do fervently wish say, 25,000 Haitians would move to Martha Raddatz’s neighborhood tonight. Maybe she'd give different coverage. But until that happens, and since they've been deported from Martha's Vineyard in all the places people like Martha Raddatz live, the Democratic Party is well able to continue lying.
Here's Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio explaining that really only racists and crazed conspiracy nuts care about the border.
WHITE HOUSE UNABLE TO DESCRIBE WHAT KAMALA HARRIS IS DOING ON IMMIGRATION
CHUCK TODD: You know, there's a lot of folks in the middle who are not very empathetic to what's happening at the border. How do you change the tone of that conversation to get them to accept a compromise like the one that Sinema and Tillis are trying to put together?
SEN. SHERROD BROWN: I think they will. I think my voters in Ohio are reasonable and we're a slightly lean Republican state now. I don't I don't hear a lot about immigration from voters except people in the far right that always want to gain political advantage by talking about it.
It's amazing. That's Sherrod Brown, supposed populist from Ohio, a guy who cares about the little guy and displaced factory workers and those 7 million working age American men who aren't working and are playing video games and watching porn all day. That's your country. Sherrod Brown was elected because he claimed to care about them. And in fact, it wasn't that long ago that Sherrod Brown was down at the border declaring a humanitarian crisis. People were living in cages, people from other countries.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
The Trump-era border wall remains unfinished after the Biden administration put a stop to it. (Fox News)
Now, that same Sherrod Brown says you're not allowed to talk about anything that's happening at the border, people camping on streets or at the airport. You also, by the way, can't talk about conditions inside migrant detention centers anymore because they've got a Democratic president Now.
Texas Representative Tony Gonzalez just went to one. He shot the footage you're seeing on your screen now. That's a detention center in El Paso. It was intended to hold about 1,000 people there, now more than 4,000 inside of it. They're about to be let out onto the street of El Paso.
Does Sherrod Brown care? What does Martha Raddatz think of this? Again, let's hope every one of these people winds up in their neighborhood.
Best of Opinion
Get the recap of top opinion commentary and original content throughout the week.
By entering your email and clicking the Subscribe button, you agree to the Fox News Privacy Policy and Terms of Use, and agree to receive content and promotional communications from Fox News. You understand that you can opt-out at any time.