The Democratic mayor of one of Texas’s largest border cities denounced the Biden administration’s handling of immigration and said things were better under former President Donald Trump.
In an interview with the Washington Free Beacon published Thursday, Laredo Mayor Pete Saenz said that his city’s public and humanitarian services are being pushed to the limit by the illegal immigration surge since President Biden took office.
“We need to truly secure the border,” Mr. Saenz said. “It was working under Trump, call it whatever you want to call it, but it was working.”
Mr. Saenz, whose city of 260,000 people is 95% Hispanic, noted that Washington Democrats are looking to pass a $3.5 trillion bill on a wish list that ranges from free community college to zero-carbon power, but little for border security, which he compared to progressive calls to defund the police.
“We’re spending billions of dollars on alternative things but immigration isn’t given priority. Border Patrol isn’t being funded to the extent that Border Patrol has to be funded,” Mr. Saenz said. “Their workload has increased to three times or four, and yet they’re not funded. So, that kind of leads me to think the Democrats have the same mentality [toward the Border Patrol] as defunding law enforcement generally.”
He noted that even the city’s fire department is being taxed, having to move immigrants whom charities and federal agencies simply drop off, for example.
Providing for the thousands of migrants who go through Laredo, which sits on the Rio Grande opposite an even-larger Mexican sister city (Nuevo Laredo), should be handled by the federal government, Mr. Saenz said in the interview.
He also pointed to the wretched Del Rio bridge and the outbreaks of COVID-19 and other diseases in Laredo as proof of the cruelty of the Biden administration’s border policy.
Mr. Biden should work on restoring Mr. Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required asylum claims to be processed overseas, he said.
“The key, ultimately, is removing the incentive to come to the border and file for asylum. I believe in the asylum process. It needs to be followed or changed. If we don’t like the way people are attempting to come, we can have them apply remotely or from either the country of origin or some other place that is close to the country of origin,” Mr. Saenz told the Free Beacon.
The chaos at the border and its effects on Texas border cities — and he’s not the first Democratic border-city mayor to criticize the Biden administration — may cause a political realignment among Texas Hispanics, Mr. Saenz warned.
Mr. Saenz told Mr. Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign that his proposed border wall wouldn’t work and he spoke similarly against physical barriers during the 2020 race, saying Mr. Biden’s “virtual wall” was more practical.
“If Biden doesn’t come out with implementing a virtual wall, people here will be begging for a wall, a physical structure, simply because of his lack of attention to the border and especially the size of these surges,” he told the Free Beacon, adding that a wall would “deter or at least buy time, so to speak, for law enforcement.”