OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz has been angrily denouncing President Joe Biden’s lax immigration enforcement policies for more than a year, but a recent finding along his state’s border with Mexico has caused him further outrage.
In a video posted online, Cruz offered a chilling explanation for a series of colored wristbands he had found that were placed on the arms of illegal immigrants.
Cruz had made a midnight visit to the border last week along the Rio Grande to see for himself whether any progress has been made in the ongoing migrant crisis that he blames on Biden’s policies and to which Vice President Kamala Harris was assigned by the president to deal with.
As he watched U.S. Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection agents desperately attempting to staunch the flow of migrants into the U.S., he discovered the colored wristbands.
“Down by the river, in just a few minutes, these are the wristbands I found,” he said, holding up the colored strips. “A white wristband, blue wristband, white, a pink and a yellow.”
“Look at the yellow wristband,” the GOP senator continued, holding up the tiny band. “That obviously was around the arm of a child, a young child.”
He went on to say that the colored bands are used by different Mexico-based human smuggling and drug cartels to determine which migrants being shuttled into the U.S. are fully paid up and which of them still owes money to the cartels.
“This is not compassionate. This is not humane,” Cruz said. “This is barbaric.”
Just past midnight this morning, I was on the border in the Rio Grande Valley and I saw firsthand the human misery caused by Joe Biden’s open borders.
It’s not humane. It’s not compassion. #BidenBorderCrisis pic.twitter.com/IaJ4sovbxI
— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) July 15, 2022
Cruz also demanded to know where Democratic lawmakers were and why they had not bothered to take trips to the border themselves to see what was really going on.
“Where are the Democrat senators? They’re not here because you can’t look at the dead bodies of the children being assaulted, at the chaos — you can’t look at it and defend it,” Cruz said.
The Texas Republican has been sounding the alarm on Biden’s border crisis for months. In September, he traveled to an area where some 10,000 mostly Haitian migrants had gathered under a bridge on the U.S. side after illegally crossing from Mexico.
“The reason they’re here is simple,” Cruz notes in the video, which pans the area behind him, showing a mass of migrants. “Eight days ago, the Biden administration made a political decision, a political decision to cancel deportation flights to Haiti. They did that on September 8th. Eight days later these numbers appear.”
“On September 8th, underneath this bridge, there were between 700 and a thousand people,” Cruz went on. “But when the word got out that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were no longer deporting people that came from Haiti, suddenly everyone was here, called their friends, called their family, and the numbers surged to 10,503. That’s what’s here today. It is more than the capacity of the Border Patrol to handle.”
I am on the ground in Del Rio, Texas tonight. As of this moment, there are 10,503 illegal aliens under the Del Rio International Bridge.
This manmade disaster was caused by Joe Biden. #BidenBorderCrisis pic.twitter.com/VpzkrH1zyb
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) September 17, 2021
“This is the result of a political decision,” Cruz noted further. “This is the result that is indefensible. What we are seeing here, is wrong. This is inhumane and this is entirely caused by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”
Biden put Harris in charge of solving the border crisis in late March, just over a month after he took office and reversed nearly all of former President Donald Trump’s immigration and border enforcement policies, including his “Remain In Mexico” directive that was widely credited with ending a migrant crisis that began in 2018.
Cruz remarked that the situation is “the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen,” as infants, children, and poverty-stricken migrants were enduring crowded, dirty, exposed conditions.
“They take your breath away because it just goes on and on and on, infants, little children, people, people struggling enormously, and something stunning that I discovered today is I discovered the cause of why this is happening,” he said.
