Third District U.S. Congressman Jim Banks spent the day in Warsaw Tuesday, with his first stop at the Kosciusko County Republican Party headquarters downtown Warsaw.
His talk to the GOP leaders focused mainly on the crisis at the border with Mexico and his observations, not hesitating to remark on the difference between the former President Donald Trump administration and Joe Biden’s.
At the end of June, Banks got invited to go down to the border with Trump. He led 23 of his Republican Study Committee colleagues with him, making it the largest delegation of Congressman to go to the border at the same time, he said. Trump and the Congressman talked about why it was important to draw attention to the border crisis.
“It is night and day different from what was going on at the border just a year ago under President Trump’s watch,” Banks said. “I was there and absolutely amazed.”
He said they were down there along the border where sections of the border wall have been built, but there’s a large gap where construction has stopped.
“There are a few observations immediately you can see at the border. One, as all of you know, on Day 1 President Biden signed an executive order to stop construction of the wall,” Banks said.
He said there’s construction material – paid for – sitting on the ground and rusting because it’s not being paid for what it was intended to be used for.
“And that’s what you see at the border. Along the border, we have 500 miles of the wall that has been built and several hundred more miles of wall that have been paid to be built. We paid for the steel. We paid for the contractors to build it, and down along the border, you see these large piles of steel just rusting because Joe Biden signed an executive order that said stop construction of the wall. So that’s the first observation you get down there and see,” Banks said.
The second observation, he said, is when you go up to the wall and see a sealed 22-foot-high wall, “you see immediately why it works. You can’t go over it and you can’t dig under it. You definitely can’t go through it.”
Border patrol agents will say that the wall helps them do their job, Banks said. While the wall isn’t the only solution to the border crisis, he says where the wall is constructed it pushes all the activity to checkpoints.
He said under President Trump, the border was under control and under Biden, “it’s the largest humanitarian crisis we’ve ever seen in American history.”
His third observation – especially at night – is large groups of migrants coming over the border.
“We would drive along these dirt roads along the border at 11, 12 o’clock, 1 o’clock in the morning, and you would see groups of migrants come out of the bushes. You would see women with young children and then very small children. In groups, huddled together. Come up out of the bushes, get on the road and then walk – the cartels tell them … to find the big white bus. So they’re not running away from us. They’re walking to border patrol,” Banks said.
He said that was not only happening because Biden signed an executive order to stop construction of the wall, but also Biden signed executive orders to reinstitute “catch and release” and to stop the “Remain in Mexico” policy.
Banks said that was what is causing the crisis at the border because “it tells anyone under the age of 18, if you come across the border, you’ll be processed and then you’ll be released in the United States of America. So that has created a situation where 1 million migrants, since Joe Biden was inaugurated on Jan. 20, cross the border illegally, processed and then allowed to go free in the United States, creating a true open-border situation.”
The fourth observation, Banks continued, is that if you go up to the wall you can see wristbands that were cut all over the ground. There are hundreds of them and different colors. The colors denote which cartel the migrant paid to allow them to cross the border. “The fourth observation is that the cartels run the border. The United States, we don’t control the border. Mexico, they don’t control the border. The cartels control the border,” he said.
What’s especially startling about that is, on top of the $10,000 to $15,000 every migrant has to pay to cross the border, there’s also other activities involved, some of which Banks said are “unspeakable,” especially as they relate to the children. And there’s the drugs.
“If I can’t pay $10,000 to $15,000 to the cartel to allow me to cross the border, I can agree to be involved in drug trafficking, or whatever it is. Once I do that and come across the border, they then cut off the wristband and allow me to go to the big white bus to be processed,” Banks stated.
He said border patrol agents say that because of the migrant/humanitarian crisis at the border, “they don’t have any time to focus on – what they focused on under Trump – what they focused more on, which is the drug trafficking, which is occurring.”
He said the border patrol agents say the cartels know the U.S. laws and how to get around them and the process.
“It’s unknown how much drugs have been trafficked across the border,” Banks said. “It’s probably more than ever before, the border agents tell us. That’s what the agents tell us.”
He said the border crisis matters to him as a Congressman in northeast Indiana because those drugs end up in Warsaw.
“They destroy families. They cripple our communities all over our region,” he said.
The fifth observation, Banks continued, is, “All of this gets even worse when the Biden administration does what Kamala Harris told us she was going to do when she went to El Paso, when she went on her fake border trip …” to repeal Title 42.
Title 42 allows the U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. Customs to prohibit the entry of persons who potentially pose a health risk, either by virtue of being subject to previously announced travel restrictions or because they unlawfully entered the country to bypass health screening measures.
Banks talked about Texas Gov. Greg Abbott calling on every governor in the country to do what they can to support what’s going on at the border. “Because today, we recognize that every state is a border state. It’s not just about Texas. This has as much to do with Indiana as it has to do with Texas because we have an invasion of migrants coming across the border, controlled by the cartels, bringing illegal activities,” he said.
The governors of Florida and South Dakota sent troops down to the border.
“This is a national cause because when the federal government fails in its fundamental role to protect our country and to protect our border, the states have to rise up and do it instead,” Banks said.
There are record-breaking crime sprees occurring in the big cities all across the country, he said, as Democrats “demonize” police officers and law enforcement “and truly defund the police “in many places.
On top of that, Banks said inflation is occurring and can be seen at the gas stations and grocery stores.
“These Democrats have spent more money than any government has ever spent in the history of the world in the last six months, resulting in record-breaking inflation rates that are not going to get better. They’re only going to get worse, especially if the Democrats achieve some of the policy goals that they have,” he said, noting that the national debt is just a hair below $30 trillion and that will continue to skyrocket under the Democrats’ watch.
He said any deficits and debts the Republicans created was “nothing compared to what these Democrats have done over the last six months.”
More concerning to him than the border crisis, crime spree and inflation combined, he said, is “the anti-American sentiment that is becoming prevalent on the left that we’re seeing breakout in places all across the country.”
He believes 75% of the American people reject the anti-American sentiment in things like critical race theory, and that will be evident in the next election. He said Republicans will win back the House of Representatives in the mid-term elections next by dozens, and the White House in 2024.
