Skip to main content

Border war comes to Capitol Hill: Lawmakers clash as top Republican Jim Jordan claims crisis is INTENTIONAL - while Democrats say 'MAGA' GOP is racist for highlighting migrant surge

February 1, 2023

The Judiciary Committee kicked off the new Congress on an extremely combative note with Chairman Jim Jordan opening with accusing the Biden administration of 'intentionally' causing the southern border crisis.

Democratic Ranking Member Jerry Nadler followed-up with his own opening remarks calling Republicans' focus on the southern border 'racist' and a 'distraction'.

Jordan made the panel's first hearing on the southern border crisis as the House GOP makes clear the issue is a top priority in their new majority.

After reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, the Ohio Republican started off the hearing by listing several staggering figures, including the more than 4.5 million illegal immigrants who have crossed the southwest U.S. border since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021.

'These numbers make clear that the Biden administration does not have operational control of the border,' Jordan said, adding that month-after-month new records are reached for migrants entering the U.S.

The hearing comes just hours before a group of House Republicans led by Arizona Representative Andy Biggs, who also participated in the hearing as a member of the Judiciary panel, plan to introduce articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

'I think it's intentional,' Jordan said of the crisis. 'I don't know how anyone with common sense or logic can reach any other conclusion. It seems deliberate, it seems premeditated, it seems intentional,' the Judiciary chairman added.

Nadler, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, lambasted the GOP leaders, saying that the hearing would prove 'the racist tendencies' of pro-Trump Republicans.

He also said that Republicans are only interested in 'showboating' and claimed Jordan is in a 'turf war' with Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman James Comer, who is holding his own hearing on the border next week.

'I wish this committee was starting off on a different note,' Nadler lamented in his opening remarks. 'Unfortunately, this hearing is more of the same haphazard, chaotic style we have come to expect of this new Republican majority.'

'We saw them take 15 tries to elect a Speaker, we saw them fumble on the opening play by needing to reschedule their first meeting and now this,' he listed.

'Furthermore, this hearing appears to be the latest spat in an ongoing turf war between Chairman Jordan and Chairman Comer.'

Republicans in Congress equally blame Mayorkas and Biden for the southern border crisis, and have torn into the leaders for insisting that the southern border is closed and under operational control.

Vice President Kamala Harris has also received the brunt of Republican ire since she was appointed border 'czar' for the administration – but has insisted her role is only to focus on root problems in Central American countries that lead to mass migration to the U.S. 

'Make no mistake about it, the Biden administration is carrying out its plan,' Jordan said, claiming that they are being successful in their efforts at the border, insisting that the influx of illegal immigration is an intentional plot by the White House. 

'We all heard Secretary Mayorkas sit in front of this committee and said, 'We are executing our plan on the border.' And we all heard President Biden say, 'We're trying to make it easier for people to get here.' Well they're certainly succeeding in that,' the chairman detailed.

'Imagine the frustration that our border communities feel when they hear that the damage done to their land and to their businesses, the crimes committed by illegal alien trespassers and the overwhelmed local resources that are all part of their own federal government's plan,' he alleged.

Democrats insisted that Biden has continued former President Donald Trump's policies at the border as a way to defend against GOP attack-lines.

The Republican side of the Judiciary panel, however, disputed this, pointing to Biden stopping construction of the border wall and ending the so-called Remain in Mexico policy, formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols. Both Trump-era provisions were key to the former administration's hawkish plan to keep illegal immigration at bay.

But Nadler says Republicans' going after the migrant crisis shows 'racism' in the pro-Trump wing of the party.

'The first hearing will showcase the racist tendencies of the extreme MAGA Republican wing of the party that seeks to close the border to refugees from places like Cuba and Venezuela,' Ranking Member Nadler noted in his opening remarks.

'It almost makes me miss their usual obsession with conspiracy theories and the FBI,' he quipped.

'I suspect this hearing is also an attempt to distract from the fact that Republicans have failed to pass any meaningful legislation in their first month in the majority.'

December figures showed a brand new all-time-high in apprehensions at the southern border with 251,487 in the single winter month where conditions reached sub-freezing temperatures in the Texas and Arizona deserts.

The latest figures, as January numbers won't be released for another few weeks, tops the last high from May 2022, also under Biden's leadership.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has encountered more than 4.5 million migrants at the southern border since Biden took office in January 2021, which Jordan noted during his remarks at the hearing Wednesday.

He also noted several other figures since Biden's presidency began. The list includes the 1.7 million illegal migrants released into the U.S.; the 8,100 average per-day number of encounters at the southwest border in December; the 1.1 million known gotaways; and the exact single-year high reached in 2022 with 2,378,944 encounters.

Jordan said several records were reached in FY2022, including 856 migrants dying as they attempted to cross the southern border and the 98 aliens encountered on the terrorist watch.

Despite the staggering encounter rate, Biden and Mayorkas have assured the southern border is closed and have insisted their policies work, refusing to admit there is a crisis at the border between the U.S. and Mexico.

A huge focus of the hearing was on drug smuggling, and specifically the massive spike in fentanyl overdoses in the U.S. with the surge coming over from the southern border.

Many Americans are finding their illicit drugs secretly laced or cut with fentanyl since it is much cheaper than the other substances. This is leading to people unknowingly taking and overdosing on fentanyl dur to improper dosing.

The father of Noah Dunn's gave a tearful testimony before the panel as he talked about the fentanyl issue after his 15-year-old son died of overdose when he thought he was taking percocet.

'For us this isn't a political issue, it's an issue of safety of our children and the people of America,' Brandon Dunn said between choking back tears.

Meanwhile, Democrats insisted during their questioning of the three witnesses at the Judiciary hearing on Wednesday that Americans should be lauding the advances made by law enforcement to seize fentanyl rather than causing more 'chaos' by bringing attention to the issue.

Democratic members of the panel also noted that most fentanyl smuggling comes through the legal ports of entry and not from illegal border hoppers.

'I think too often, many of my colleagues on the other side, have rooted on some of the chaos around this issue and don't want to be a part of the solutions or change,' Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell said.

He then read off a series of tweets posted by GOP lawmakers about the fentanyl issue, including those who pointed to big drug busts at the border or the number of overdoses over a certain period of time.

'This is just cheering on chaos instead of honoring the police who did the tough job, the hard work and seized the drugs and took them off the streets,' Swalwell said in a confusing line of reason.

'If we want to talk about some of the fentanyl facts, 96 percent of the fentanyl seized in the last fiscal year was seized at ports of entry,' the California Democrat noted. 'And 86 percent of the convictions around fentanyl coming across our border were convictions of U.S. purses.'

'So we should talk about fentanyl, we should go after China, but this – this is chaos what I'm seeing from my Republican colleagues.'

El Paso, Texas County Judge Ricardo Samaniego, one of the three witnesses, noted that fentanyl is usually coming through ports of entry and not through individuals or smugglers coming across illegally.

Democratic Representative Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania repeated these sentiments.

She also said that Republicans should focus more on 'trying to solve these problems' of fentanyl smuggling and overdoses instead of 'just trying to make people afraid of them.'

Read the full article here.