By Virginia Allen, The Daily Signal | December 10, 2024
President-elect Donald Trump made mass deportations a pillar of his winning campaign platform. Trump and Tom Homan—the former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who Trump tapped to be his border czar—say they will prioritize the deportations of criminal illegal aliens.
Whether all of the estimated more than 10 million illegal aliens who entered the country under the Biden-Harris administration are deported or not is ultimately up to the incoming Trump administration, says Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
But when mass deportations begin, “the media will do everything they can to find a heartbreaking story,” Cruz told The Daily Signal after a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill discussing mass deportations, adding, “there are a lot of tragic stories. One thing the media never covers are these tragedies that are produced by these open borders.”
A mother who is all too familiar with the tragedies of the open-border crisis shared her story before Cruz and the other senators on the Judiciary Committee during Tuesday’s hearing.
In the summer of 2023, Patty Morin received a phone call that her daughter’s body had been found. At the time, Morin only knew that her daughter Rachel, 37 and the mother of five, was dead, but she soon learned the details of Rachel’s death.
“I was told that she was beaten so badly that her body was blanketed in bruises, that she was strangled, that she was raped, and that she was stuffed into a drainpipe,” Morin told the senators.
After a lengthy investigation, authorities arrested Victor Antonio Martinez-Hernandez, an illegal alien from El Salvador, on charges of rape and murder in the death of Rachel Morin.
“We need to close our borders. We need to protect American families. We need to protect our women and children, which are the most vulnerable in this country,” Patty Morin said.
“I think that you should put American citizens first,” Morin told the senators. “We are the ones that pay your paycheck. We are the ones that pay taxes.”
It is not Americans alone who have suffered because of the current administration’s border policies, according to Cruz.
“Incredible abuse of migrants” has taken place because of the border crisis, the Texas lawmaker said.
“Every day, illegal immigrants are killed,” he said. “They are raped. They are brutalized. When you go down to the southern border, and you look in the eyes of a little girl, a little boy who has been brutalized by human traffickers, it is haunting, and the media doesn’t tell that story.”
In August, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported that it doesn’t know the location or status of more than 300,000 migrant children. Between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, some 32,000 illegal alien minors did not appear for their immigration court hearing, and an additional 291,000 were never given an immigration court date at all.
Nearly 5,000 unaccompanied migrant children were encountered at the southern border in December 2020, the last full month of Trump’s first term. By July 2021, Customs and Border Protection reported nearly 19,000 encounters with unaccompanied migrant children for the month.
According to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, 81% of unaccompanied alien children are between the ages of 13 and 18. The average age of a trafficking victim in the U.S. is between 12 and 15, according to Anti-Trafficking International.
The criminal cartels have exploited a loophole in U.S. law that has allowed unaccompanied alien children from any country except Mexico and Canada to be paroled into the country. A bill known as HR 2 would have closed this loophole. The House passed HR 2 in May 2023, but the Democrat-controlled Senate never took it up.
Even with Republicans set to take control of the Senate in January, Cruz, who authored the Senate version of HR 2, says, “Democrats are not going to pass HR 2. Every Democrat has voted against it, and every Democrat continues to support these open borders.”
“The good news,” according to Cruz, “is the vast majority of the damage that has been done the last four years in open borders was done through unilateral executive action, which means it can be undone through unilateral executive action.”
Cruz added that Congress is going to act and will take up “a budget reconciliation bill that is going to provide the funding to secure the border.”
Stopping the flow of illegal immigration begins by answering the questions, “What happens when someone’s apprehended?” Cruz said. “And if the answer is that they’re put on a plane and sent back to the country they came from, the numbers plummet, and if the answer is they’re released and allowed to stay in this country, the numbers skyrocket.”
Trump will be sworn into office on Jan. 20, and Cruz predicts that “we will see the numbers plummet in January and February of next year.”
Virginia Allen is a senior news producer for The Daily Signal and host of "The Daily Signal Podcast" and "Problematic Women."
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