Transcript: Cruz Says Obama’s Border Plan Doesn’t ‘Stop the Lawlessness’

Kelsey Bolar /

Kelsey Harkness, The Daily Signal: Senator Cruz, thank you for joining us. If you do the math, President Obama’s [$3.7 billion] funding proposal amounts to $12 for every single American. Do you think this is how individuals want their money to be spent when it comes to solving the crisis on the border?

Sen. Ted Cruz: Of course it isn’t, and most strikingly, it doesn’t even purport to solve it. It’s $3.7 billion, and less than 5 percent of it goes to actual border security. The president’s selling it as a border security bill, but it’s a social services bill. It goes to Health and Human Services, it goes to social services … And this bill the president has put forward assumes that we will continue to see this humanitarian crisis for years going forward, because it doesn’t fix the problem.

We are seeing right now — this year, it’s going to be roughly 90,000 little boys and little girls in the hands of drug dealers and cartels being physically victimized, sexually victimized. … And this humanitarian crisis is the direct consequence of President Obama’s lawlessness — of the amnesty that these children believe is promised to them. If we want to solve this crisis — if we want to respond to the suffering of these kids, the only way to do so is to stop the lawlessness — to start enforcing our immigration laws and to secure the borders.

President Obama’s bill doesn’t even attempt to do that. Instead, it assumes the problem will continue in perpetuity, and that’s the wrong approach to take.

Harkness: Is there anything in the bill you support? Any piece of it?

Cruz: Look, there is a modest increase in border security, but it is so modest that it’s not likely to have any effect. Less than 5 percent of the bill is border security. Now, the president describes it as a border security bill, and that’s sadly the same pattern we’ve seen from President Obama of bait and switch.

We all remember the stimulus in 2009 that was sold to the American people — that this is about roads and infrastructure and shovel-ready jobs, and people like roads and infrastructure and shovel-ready jobs … And yet Congress passed over $800 billion in stimulus and very little of it went to roads and infrastructure and shovel-ready jobs. Instead, it went to paying off liberal special interest groups like ACORN.

This is the same thing. He calls it a border security bill but when less than 5 percent of the funds go to border security, it’s all about increasing government spending — which remains right at the very top of President Obama’s priorities. What should be the priority is stopping this humanitarian crisis by stopping the lawlessness that is causing these children to be handed over to drug cartels who are victimizing and abusing these kids.

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