An illegal migrant told Fox News on Thursday that the U.S.-Mexico border is “open” as he stood in front of Vice President Kamala Harris’ official residence.
Two buses from Eagle Pass, Texas, dropped off 101 migrants — including the interviewee — in front of the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., Thursday morning as part of Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s policy of bussing migrants to Democrat-run cities, Fox News reported.
The migrant, who fled Venezuela, contradicted the vice president’s claim that the border is “secure,” which she made during a Sunday appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“Vice President Harris said that the border is closed, is the border closed? Do you believe that the border is closed or is it open?” Fox News national correspondent Griff Jenkins asked.
“It’s open, not closed,” the man responded. “The border is open.”
He added that all the migrants believe the border is open for them to enter freely and illegally into the United States. When asked why he came illegally, he said he was fleeing the ongoing crisis in Venezuela.
“It’s open because we enter. We come in, free, no problem,” the man said.
Harris assured NBC News host Chuck Todd on Sunday that the border is secure, despite border agents apprehending nearly two million migrants since October 2021. She blamed the current migration crisis on the “broken immigration system” and called for creating a pathway to citizenship.
“There is no question that we have to do what the president and I asked Congress to do. The first request we made: pass a bill to create a pathway to citizenship. The border is secure, but we also have a broken immigration system and particular[ly] over the last four years before we came in and it needs to be fixed,” Harris said.
Migrant apprehension numbers have nearly doubled since President Joe Biden assumed office in January 2021. As of July, Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) fiscal-year-to-date numbers for 2022 showed that Border Patrol agents had encountered 1.9 million migrants at the southern border, up from the 1.7 million apprehended in 2021, according to CBP.
Reporting from The Daily Caller.
