Before a speech Monday from the border town of Eagle Pass, Texas, the Florida governor viewed the southern border from a helicopter with a Fox News reporter and later criticized the porous nature of Trump’s wall.
“I was in Arizona the other day. You’re like — wall, then it just stops,” he said, warning that the structure allows illegal entry by members of Mexican drug cartels, who can “cut through the really reinforced steel beams.”
“If someone broke into your house to do something bad, you would respond with violence. But why don’t we do that at the southern border?” DeSantis said at a post-speech press conference. “If the cartels break through the border wall and try to get products into this country, they’re going to end up stone cold dead as a result of that bad decision and once you do that, you won’t see it.” they will never mess with our wall again.”
DeSantis is second in the polls, behind Trump by double digits, and is watching the field expand into a mob diluting its own position. His speech indicated that he sees the border as an issue that hurts both Trump and Biden, while also appealing to his hardliner following.
“What I’ve seen at the border is just humiliating as a country — that we can’t even enforce the territorial integrity of this nation,” DeSantis said in a speech designed to undermine Biden for one of his bigger political commitments.
He even seemed to agree with the prospect of declaring war on illegal immigration when someone in the audience asked. “I think the state of Texas has the right to declare an invasion,” DeSantis said.
DeSantis said the “ruling class” in Washington, D.C., is ignoring the spread of fentanyl in the United States — a problem he repeatedly attributed to illegal southern border crossings.
And he vowed to use the executive branch to crack down on border crossings.
Public polls have shown voters are troubled by Biden’s handling of the border — an issue that emerged at the end of a Covid era policy restricting migrants from entering the country. A Global Strategy Group poll released in April found that 58 percent of voters in seven battleground states disapproved of the White House’s handling of the issue, compared to just 32 percent who supported the president.
DeSantis hopes to make the issue just as big of a deal for his main Republican competitor. Trump ran on a mantra in 2016 of building a wall along the US-Mexico border, but the structure was not completed — something DeSantis, who is trailing Trump in the polls, has seized on as he crisscrossed the early voting states of travels the country.
Trump’s MAGA PAC issued a scathing statement in anticipation of DeSantis’ speech, which began with a tweet DeSantis posted in 2021 applauding Trump’s border policy.
“President Trump has secured the US border, just ask Ron DeSantis,” the statement read.
The statement outlined Trump’s own border policies, including a vow to issue an executive order that would end the policy of automatic citizenship for US-born children of parents who do not legally reside here, and would “yet build more border wall”.
Democrats slammed DeSantis, who has shipped border crossings from Florida to posh parts of New York and California as he geared up for his presidential run, and again after he declared.
“Ron DeSantis has repeatedly used young children and families as pawns in his superficial political stunts to pander to the MAGA base,” said Ammar Moussa, spokesman for the Democratic National Committee. “This latest plan is more of the same — political gimmicks that are just an echo of the same brutal and ruthless Trump administration policies that have broken our immigration system.”
DeSantis, who represents a state with a large Hispanic population, routinely makes it a point to discuss border crossings that are not of South and Central American origin. Monday he warned border crossings from China and Tajikistan, as well as those on terrorist lists.