Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina … and the lettuce-growing fields of Yuma, Arizona?
The nation’s southern border has joined the early primary states as required stops for Republican presidential contenders.
Sen. Tim Scott was the latest to visit Yuma to get a firsthand look at one of the hot spots on the border under the Biden administration. During a roundtable discussion, he heard the county sheriff describe the chaos of people streaming over the border and listened as a Spanish-speaking mother shared the story of her 16-year-old son who was killed by an overdose of fentanyl, the deadly synthetic opioid that has become the smuggling cartels’ major moneymaker.
The senator from South Carolina promised to finish the border wall, add more Border Patrol agents and take the fight to the cartels if he reaches the White House.
“I was at the border of 2019, and the thing that’s changed the most is Joe Biden coming into office has allowed for more than 6 million folks across our border illegally, and that’s equally as unfortunate as that 70,000 Americans have lost their lives to fentanyl,” Mr. Scott said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley are two 2024 hopefuls who have visited the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas. Former Vice President Mike Pence visited Arizona last year to discuss border security.
The candidates gather intelligence on the ground that can get lost in translation between agents on the front lines and politicians and news accounts in Washington.
They invariably pay homage to the work of former President Donald Trump, who left office with the least chaotic border in modern history — though immigration rights activists decried his policies as inhumane.
Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, said Republicans made the border a destination a decade ago after the Senate’s last major foray into immigration policy with a bill to grant amnesty to most illegal immigrants.
The Senate cleared the legislation, but the House never took action. Mr. Judd said the issue galvanized Republican voters.
“That’s when the public really started to take notice of, ‘Hey, there is this major, major problem and the only thing that politicians talk about to solve the problem is to legalize these people that violate our laws,’” Mr. Judd said. “It really, really upset the public. I mean, it really upset them.”
Then came Mr. Trump, who descended on the escalator to announce his campaign in 2015 with a complaint about “rapists” sneaking across the border, a vision of “a great wall” to seal it off — and a promise to have Mexico pay for it.
Like so much else about Mr. Trump, his stance became gospel for Republican voters. — and the caravans of politicians to the border began.
Republican members of Congress stop at the border to complain about President Biden’s handling of the situation. So do some Democrats. During hearings in Washington, they proudly tick off their numbers of visits.
Presidential hopefuls visit to collect stories they can deploy on the campaign trail to show they understand the suffering of border communities under Mr. Biden.
Mr. Scott heard Yuma County Sheriff Leon N. Wilmot talk about Border Patrol encounters with 140 nationalities of people trying to sneak into the U.S. — and the mother whose teenage son died of an overdose.
“He was in a coma for three days, and he never woke up,” she said.
The head of a food bank told Mr. Scott that the flow of illegal immigrants has led to an unsustainable increase in the number of people struggling to find food — from 250,000 in 2019 to 340,000.
A hospital worker and the executive director of a family advocacy center that treats victims of abuse, sexual assault and sex trafficking said they are overwhelmed.
Mr. Scott also heard about challenges to the military when illegal immigrants make their way across a bombing range during live-fire exercises.
Though the border stretches nearly 2,000 miles from the California coast to the southern tip of Texas, Republicans usually visit Texas and Arizona.
Mr. Judd, a frequent chaperone for the visitors, said each state has stories to tell.
Arizona has open deserts and not enough agents to patrol its entire border. Texas has major border cities where groups of 100 or more people at a time barrel into the U.S. They expect to be caught and then quickly released by overwhelmed agents before they make their way deeper into the country.
“If you want to see cartels and their brutality, you’re going to go to Arizona, and you’re going to look at how they just abandoned people in the middle of the desert and leave them to die,” Mr. Judd said. “If you want to see people that are giving up, you’re going to go to Texas and watch a large number of people just cross the border illegally, and they don’t even care that the media is picking it up, and they just give up because they know that they’re going to be released.”
Mr. Judd said he took a delegation of 19 Senate Republicans in 2001 to McAllen, Texas, where smugglers taunted them from across the river.
“They were shouting at us. They were shining lights on us,” he said. “They just didn’t care, which is very unusual. Again, most of the time the cartels like to lay low and smugglers like to lay low. They don’t want to be visible. But at that time, it was so obvious that the government was going to do nothing to stop them.”
Mr. Judd said some of his visitors are truly interested in solving the border problem and others are “disingenuous” politicians who come simply for photo ops.
He is ready to welcome either variety.
“Does it matter? No, I don’t care,” he said. “I just want the public to recognize that there is a problem.”
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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