Following her visit to the southern border, Tennessee GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn said that "every town is a border town" during the migrant surge at the southwestern U.S. crossing under President Biden.
These interior checkpoints are closed because of staffing shortages, as the agents have all had to be pushed to the border to protect the border," Blackburn said on Tuesday during a news briefing with reporters. "ICE [Immigration Customs Enforcement] is refusing to pick up criminal aliens from some of the prisons and the county jails. They're overflowing.
"Sheriff Lam [of Pinal County, Ariz.] said more illegal immigrants are likely to end up in Tennessee than in Pinal County because they just transit through his county on their way to the final destination in the interior. And the cartels are pushing people through these counties and into the interior. They are very emboldened with this Biden open border policy, and until we secure this southern border, every town is a border town and every state is a border state."
Blackburn said there are some steps that the Biden administration should take quickly to deal with the crisis at the border, including reimplementing the Trump administration's border enforcement policies such as the "Remain in Mexico" policy that required migrants stopped at the southern border to wait for their court hearings in Mexico rather than the U.S. interior.
