Hakeem Jeffries now claims Dems want to ‘secure the border’
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters on Thursday that the Democrats believe the country needs to “secure the border” and make sure that it is “safe and strong,” ideas that Republicans, including President Donald Trump, pushed for years under the Biden administration and its border crisis.
In response to a reporter’s question on whether Democrats would support additional funding for border security proposed by Republicans, Jeffries said, “We would need to look at the particulars.”
“We believe that we need to secure the border. Make sure that it is safe, and strong, that the rule of law consistent with America as a country of a nation of laws is fully and completely implemented at the border.”
He continued, “We believe we have a broken immigration system and we need to fix it in a comprehensive and in a bipartisan way, and we also believe that we must always defend Dreamers, farm workers, and law-abiding immigrant families and protect them from aggressive overreach by the Trump administration.”
Border crossings under the Trump administration have plummeted. In December, the last full month of the Biden administration, there were 96,036 southwest border encounters, per US Customs and Border Patrol data. That fell to 61,447 in January and just 11,709 in February. For comparison, February 2024 saw 189,913 southwest border encounters.
Border Czar Tom Homan said in a recent interview that “31 percent of women that make that journey get raped by the criminal cartels. Children were dying on that border every day, dying either down in a river, dying making that journey. Children were sexually assaulted. The children were dying in the desert.” This is what led to the “zero tolerance” policy of the Trump administration on illegal immigration.
“You know, they made that journey. And lot of women and children not only died, many were sexually assaulted. So we said, ‘Look, how can we save lives? How can we stop the sexual assault of children.’ So we said, ‘Look, let’s prosecute them, because it’s a crime to enter this country illegally. So if we prosecute them and put them in jail, maybe the numbers go down, maybe less will come.’ And it worked.”