Interview With Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX);
Interview
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Look, I am going to be pissed off every day that we have almost 300,000 illegal people crossing our border and most of them let loose in the United States.
Look, I'm of the opinion that we need a solution on this. I'm very frustrated by this process. I think the Senate process was destined to fail from the beginning.
You put one senator in the room who is in the minority, with really no leverage over two other senators who are in the majority, who really have no incentive to make a strong deal because they are not worried about the re-election.
I've said from the beginning, this should -- what we should have done as Republicans is follow the playbook we did with the debt ceiling where we have an established set of negotiation baselines, right?
And for us, that's HR 2, right? That's our border bill. We start there. We say that's where we want to go. We go straight to the White House, because Biden is the one who is actually worried about his re- election, and this is a historic moment where we can actually make a deal.
And so what we should be doing is sending that supplemental right back with HR 2 attached to it, we finally enter the conversation.
You know, I'm not part of the Senate. I am part of the House and so that's what I would do to keep this going because in the end, that's what I care about, it is border security.
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I don't know. I guess, you need to talk to -- I'm not one of those Republicans. So I do know that we need HR 2. We need changes to our asylum laws. There's too many loopholes.
We need to clarify the parole authority, which is being abused massively by this administration. We need to codify into law remain- in-Mexico. We do need HR 2, right?
The immigration laws have not been updated and far too long, and they've been exploited by the cartels, by people just looking for a job but exploited nonetheless and cutting in front of the line of millions and millions of legal immigrants.
So we absolutely need that. I'm not one of those Republicans saying we don't need changes in law. We have an historic opportunity to get those changes in law now.
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I am never going to stop saying that.
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Well, we have the majority in the House. So we would disagree, we would think that we could get more and we should try to do that.
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But late to this process, it was flawed from the start -- on part of the Republicans, it was flawed from the start, because you put one person in there, you make it completely secret, didn't do a communications plan with everybody surrounding them. They didn't tell anybody what was in it.
Immigration law is extremely complicated. So when it comes out, everybody interprets it every which way. You've got to start with HR 2 and then you go from there.
Of course, there's a negotiation. But of course -- and of course, HR 2 by itself is done in the Senate. I acknowledge that, but we're adding the supplemental to it.
We're talking about Ukraine aid, which is extremely unpopular with Republicans, but in a couple of these things, and America wins. America wins in both ways. So, that's still my goal.
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Look, here is what I say to people who think that they need to let illegal immigrants in just to hurt Biden in the polls. My message to Trump is I think you can beat Biden. I think -- I will help you beat Biden. That's my message.
And look, Biden is unpopular in so many ways. People do not trust him on border security, or the economy, or on various other issues. We need to actually solve the border crisis.
It is also true that there are people on both sides and mostly in the activist groups. There have been forever that never want this problem solved. All viewers need to know this, right? On the left and the right, they make money by this -- by perpetuating this problem and I am sure you can never actually solve this.
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No, I am not. I am not. I know you want me to say that.
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I mean, look, you'd have to ask him. You'd have to -- you'd have to pull a quote from him that I can respond to. I don't --
I don't know Trump's views on the border. I really don't.
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They're wrong. Look, I disagree with them. I disagreed with them in conversations today on the floor, saying -- and I said look, if we didn't need new border laws, why did we pass HR 2? You know Trump needed new border laws when he was president, he needed laws changed. What he ended up doing which was great, he made a deal with Mexico. He did the remain-in-Mexico policy.
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He created the asylum cooperation agreements with Northern Triangle countries. That's what he ended up having to do.
So look, I mean, I know you want to be like kind of get into a fight with Trump. I'm not going to do it. I'm just going to say --
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And what's true is we need a border deal.
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It's great. I mean, look, anytime -- anytime you make it more dangerous for someone to be promoted in Kata'ib Hezbollah, I think it's a good day.
I'm glad they're doing it. It sounds like it was a good strike. It sounds like there was no additional casualties. There's obviously some good intel that led up to that and it is a good hit.
I think we need to continue seeing more of it. I think we need to know that the administration meant what they said when they said we're going to keep doing this for a period of time. I think that's important, and deterrence is important.
That part of the world, honestly, the entire world, they only understand strength. And when you say peace through strength, you can't forget about the strength part. So I have no complaints.
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Thanks.
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