The White House on Monday reiterated that immigration czar Vice President Kamala Harris has no plans to visit the border — as new video shows a group of about 50 illegal immigrants overwhelming Border Patrol agents in Texas on Sunday, in the latest example of the ongoing crisis on the southern crossing.
Despite the alarming footage, White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Monday said Harris, who was appointed by President Biden to oversee the border in March, still has made no arrangements to surveil the situation in person and talk to local officials there.
“I expect she will make a trip to the Northern Triangle at some point soon. So that would be where she would travel given her purview,” Psaki said when asked during her daily briefing if the veep would go to the area.
The video, taken by a drone by Fox News, shows one agent in a pickup truck trying to capture more than a dozen migrants running along a dirt road as another agent pursued more members of the group as they leaped over a stream near La Joya, Texas.
Two of the migrants fleeing along the road appeared to be handcuffed together, indicating they had escaped custody.
Eventually, the agents were able to capture about 20 of them — a group made up of mostly adult males, the report said.
Another group of migrants — about 53 people from Romania, Venezuela, Guatemala and Honduras — surrendered to Border Patrol agents instead of trying to flee, the report said.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott warned during an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” that the surge of migrants coming across the southern border is causing a “dramatic increase” in the amount of drugs being brought into the US.
“The Texas Department of Public Safety patrols the border every single day. And they have seen an 800 percent increase in the amount of fentanyl coming across the border. They seized this year enough fentanyl to kill every man, woman and child in the entire state of New York,” Abbott said Sunday.
He said that while Texas is cracking down on the illegal drug trade, “Americans need to wake up to the crisis.”
“The border issue is not on the Rio Grande Valley. It goes all the way up to New York or to Minnesota or Chicago, places across the country. And what the border crisis is doing that Biden has opened up, it is enriching the cartels, who profit off of moving fentanyl and other drugs into the United States,” Abbott said.
Migrants from the Northern Triangle countries — Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — have interpreted President Biden’s reversal of the majority of the Trump administration’s immigration policies as a sign of encouragement to travel to the US.
It has led to the Biden White House being overwhelmed by the surge of migrants — especially unaccompanied children — making their way to the US.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has blamed the new president for the crisis, arguing that the “expectations” he set left migrants with the perception that they would be let into the US.