The lieutenant governor of Texas called Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi "almost treasonous" for suggesting the American people were not as concerned about immigration as President Donald Trump suggests.
Speaking with Laura Ingraham on Fox News Wednesday, Dan Patrick responded angrily to the House speaker's recent suggestion that "these newcomers make America more American," and that the president exploited economic concerns among voters to turn them against migrants. "I don't think that's where the American people really are," Pelosi told CNN.
Patrick told Ingraham, "When I hear something like that from soft-spoken Nancy like she seems to care, it is almost treasonous what she's doing, selling out this country."
Patrick went on to blame Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for the plight of young migrants who risk their lives trying to make it across the southern border. "I view her as nothing more than a slaveholder because she's in charge of not helping these people, these poor young girls," Patrick said of Pelosi.
"These poor young girls, they are trapped in cantinas and bars all over this country. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are responsible for this."
Trump has declared the scale of new arrivals at the southern border a crisis. While insisting the U.S. was "full," the Trump administration has used a policy of family separation to deter migrants from seeking to enter the U.S., forced asylum seekers to wait for long periods in Mexico for their applications to be processed and emboldened the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) department to detain suspected undocumented immigrants all over the country.
Immigration courts in the meantime are have huge case backlogs that could take years to clear. This was exacerbated by the longest federal shutdown in American history, while the rate of new arrivals at the border remained high.
Some Democrats reacted with skepticism to Trump's declaring the border situation a national crisis, and others have instead argued that the problems stemmed from the administration's refusal to invest in and support the legal immigration and asylum processes. But Patrick said that those who did not believe the president should go and see for themselves.
"I will give any Democrat $10,000 to their favorite charity—come down to Texas and go out in no-man's-land with me where these cartels drop off these pregnant women, these children, these old people and they die," he said.
"Come with me, Democrat, come from Rhode Island or whatever state you want to be from where you don't have a clue about what's going on to Americans and people," he declared. "I will take them out and I will give them a half a gallon of water and I'm gonna see how long they last. And they are going to realize it's a crisis.
"And I will take them to a cantina where we just rounded up 59 young girls recently and before we can help them, the drug cartel lawyers are there to spring them and they are scared to death to say anything."
"This is a crisis of unbelievable proportions," Patrick argued. Ingraham then repeated comments from Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, who said that South Bend, Indiana, where he serves as mayor, was not full.
"Send the jet planes here, we'll take them to his town," Patrick said.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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David Brennan is Newsweek's Diplomatic Correspondent covering world politics and conflicts from London with a focus on NATO, the European ... Read more
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