Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, slammed the Biden administration’s border policies during a committee hearing on Tuesday.
The Senate Judiciary subcommittee on border security and immigration showcased steep political divides between attitudes of the Trump administration’s efforts to increase deportations of immigrants in the country illegally.
“No president has ever done what [Biden’s] administration did, which is say we don’t care about the law,” Cruz said of the Biden administration’s border security policy. “We are all about partisan politics and we’re going to let them all go. And God help the communities we release them into.”
Cruz said the Biden administration’s policies allowed immigrants to be released back into the country after they were found to be eligible for deportation.
“Gotaways are the illegal immigrants we know are here, we see signs of them, we see tracks, but they didn’t turn themselves in,” Cruz said. “Gotaways are much, much more likely to be child molesters, much more likely to be gang members, much more likely to be terrorists.”
Cruz mentioned the cases of Laken Riley and Jocelyn Nungaray, two women who were murdered in separate incidents by alleged “gotaways.”
The Texas senator also criticized former President Joe Biden’s calls for legislation to address immigration reform.
“It turned out we didn’t need new legislation, we just needed a new president,” Cruz added.
He pointed to statistics from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security showing a 93% decrease in border encounters, 95% decrease in “gotaways” encounters and a 99% decrease in daily border crossings in the first 100 days of the Trump administration.
Democrats on the committee pushed back on Cruz and other Republicans’ statements, and took issue with the Trump administration’s efforts to deport immigrants based on meeting a “quota.”
Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., said there is a “mountain of evidence” that immigration authorities are relying on race, accents and workplaces to arrest and deport people. Padilla also said the Trump administration’s efforts have led to an increase in arrests of noncitizens without criminal records.
“This is increasingly about sending armored vehicles and agents and tactical gear into communities to intimidate and sow fear, not to protect,” Padilla said.
