Pressley’s Alternate Border Reality
Even CNN’s Jake Tapper couldn’t believe that Ayanna Pressley kept repeating the lie about a “secure” border.
“No doubt about it,” boasted House “Squad” member Ayanna Pressley, “our border is secure.” Then she added a seemingly contradictory statement: “And we are in the midst of a humanitarian crisis, and we have to fix a broken system.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper couldn’t believe his ears and asked her to clarify. “You think the border is secure?” he asked. “Or it is not secure?”
Pressley repeated her assertion about a humanitarian crisis, so Tapper repeated his question. Again, Pressley repeated her assertion: “Yes, the border is secure, and we are in the midst of a humanitarian crisis that has been created by a broken system.” Tapper tried two more times to get Pressley to say something that made any sense, and she just wouldn’t do it.
“If you have millions of undocumented migrants coming into the country, how is the border secure?” he asked. Later, he flatly asserted, “If you have people crossing the border, it’s just by definition not secure.” He concluded the interview totally perplexed by her “refusal to acknowledge reality.”
It was indeed a surreal exchange (relevant part begins at the 3:18 mark).
Who broke the system?
Joe Biden did, by allowing inviting an intentional invasion. Yet all Pressley could say is that it’s “not a new crisis.” No, it began on January 20, 2021.
How “secure” is the border?
Well, Tapper is right that “we all know millions of people are crossing the border illegally every year,” which is “by definition not secure.”
In August, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 233,000 encounters with illegal crossers, a record for August. September might be even worse, as the CBP recorded two days in the last week with 11,000 encounters — in one day. Over the course of five days, CBP said there were 50,000 encounters.
Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens indicated this week that over the course of the fiscal year so far — October 1, 2022, through August 31, 2023 — there were 12,659 encounters with someone who had a criminal history. There were “852 subjects with warrants,” he said, and “564 gang members,” along with loads of weapons and ammunition seized.
We’d be willing to bet that the number of criminals is even higher among the estimated 1.8 million “gotaways” who evaded Border Patrol encounters while entering the country.
According to CBP, there have been more than 6.6 million border encounters since February 2021. There are 33 states with populations smaller than 6.6 million. Eleven states have populations smaller than the estimated number of gotaways.
Pressley is right about one thing: That’s a humanitarian crisis.
On the other hand, she stubbornly insists in the face of all the evidence to the contrary that the border is “secure,” and that really clarifying that demonstrably bogus assertion is a “conversation for another day.” Yet she represents a district in Boston, Massachusetts — a state where Democrat Governor Maura Healey declared a state of emergency last month amidst the surge of illegals into the state. Democrats in other states have likewise started screaming about Biden’s border crisis.
Why does Pressley refuse to admit the truth? Who does she think she’s fooling?
If you want to hear a member of Congress who knows the border is not secure, try Alabama Republican Senator Katie Britt. She says the border has become a “nightmare.”