Stephen Miller: 'If cartels had a vote,' they would back Biden border policies 'unanimously'

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Miller: If cartels had a vote, they would back Biden border policies

Former Trump senior adviser weighs in on Biden's handling of the border crisis and infrastructure on 'Special Report'

It is "deeply insulting" to describe the Trump administration's border and immigration policies as inhumane, former White House senior adviser Stephen Miller told "Special Report" Monday. 

"We ended the process of human smuggling and trafficking that destroys lives, that leads to sexual assault, that leads to physical assault, and that finances the cartels, creating the cycle of violence and poverty," Miller told host Bret Baier. "If the cartels had a vote, they would vote for, unanimously, the border policies in place under Biden.

"It is making them rich beyond their wildest dreams," Miller added. "It is inhumane to push men, women and children into the arms of traffickers, and it's also inhumane to have a policy that means more drugs get across our border because our border agents are dealing with the humanitarian crisis. Those drugs are going to end up in U.S. schools and U.S. communities, poisoning American children."

The number of arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have declined 65% from when former President Donald Trump left office in January. 

ICE DETENTIONS PLUNGE UNDER BIDEN, LEAVING THOUSANDS OF EMPTY BEDS

"In 2019, after three years of court battles, we finally succeeded at putting into place the tools that we need to immediately repatriate, return or remove illegal immigrants to their own country or to a third party country," Miller claimed. "Those tools were fully in place by early 2020, and the border crisis was solved and ended in a permanent and enduring way ... Between [Trump's] Return to Mexico [policy] and our safe third [country] agreements and Title 42 for minors, we had a permanent, complete, enduring, unbeatable fix of the border crisis. You just had to leave it in place. Undoing those tools created the nightmare we're seeing today."

Miller also discussed President Biden's infrastructure plan, telling Baier that the concept of "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects is an impossibility due to regulatory procedures.

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"If you accept one federal dollar, just one, for your project, what comes with that are 99 federal rules and requirements that you have to comply with as a result of that. That's why it takes five to seven years to get a permit approved," he said. "So you can't have 'shovel-ready' unless you get rid of the extreme fragmentation in the approval process and you have a single department, the Department of Transportation, make a single decision probably in three to six months -- yes or no -- and then require state and locals to be just as speedy to accept the federal dollar."

However, Miller went on, "absent structural reform to how America does infrastructure, to make it more the way Canada does or more the way Australia does, it is going to be wasted money. It's not going to go into the ground, and a huge portion of that money is going to go to legal compliance and consultants and not into actual building. That's what we've seen for decades in this country. That's the problem that has to get solved.