Florida will send its own law enforcement officers to the U.S.-Mexico border to help federal, state, and local police responding to the border crisis in Arizona and Texas. Govs. Doug Ducey (R-Ariz.) and Greg Abbott (R-Texas) have asked every other state to help amid the crisis.
“We are the first state to commit support for this effort in response to the request that was submitted by the governors of Texas and Arizona, and we’re proud to lead, yet again, on issues that matter to Floridians,” Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) announced at a press conference on Wednesday afternoon, The Washington Examiner reported.
Officers from the Florida Highway Patrol, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and the sheriff’s offices of Brevard County, Escambia County, Hillsborough County, Holmes County, Lee County, Okaloosa County, Pasco County, Santa Rosa County, and Walton County will aid in the effort. The Florida Division of Emergency Management will oversee the deployments.
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“You have a governor who is saying, ‘We’ll step up to protect Floridians.’ This is what real leadership looks like,” Attorney General Ashley Moody (R-Fla.) said at the press conference. “Leadership is not sending someone down there to beg people not to come,” Moody added in a dig at Vice President Kamala Harris’ recent trip to Guatemala, during which she told migrants not to travel to the border.
“When you have chaos versus order, crime versus safety, you develop strategic enforcement actions, and you bring peace and protection to your people. That’s what a leader does,” Moody added. “In these short few months that this administration has been in charge, we have seen a 230% increase in fentanyl seizures, enough to kill almost half of the American population. We have seen over a 3,000% increase in sexual offenders being detained at the border. As a mother, as a former prosecutor and judge, that infuriates me and terrifies me.”
A methamphetamine crisis in northern Florida has grown worse over the past six months due to President Joe Biden’s 180-degree reversal of Trump’s border policies, DeSantis said.
“If you go back 10-20 years ago, you find these places where they’d be cooking this stuff up locally,” the governor explained. “That’s not what’s happening now. It’s almost all coming across the southern border, and it’s been accelerating for the last six months, and its steepening the problems that we’re having in terms of getting a handle on this in our own communities here in the state of Florida.”
It stands to reason that the border crisis would impact states across the country, given the dire situation. In May, border agents stopped 180,034 people who tried to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border — a 21-year high. Since the 2021 fiscal year began in October 2020, border officials stopped 929,868 people who illegally crossed the border, almost double the 459,000 they stopped in 2020.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Del Rio Sector Border Patrol agents have arrested 95 convicted sex offenders since October 1, 2020, a whopping 3,166 percent increase over the same timeframe last fiscal year. Biden canceled Operation Talon, a Trump administration initiative that deported illegal immigrants who had been convicted of sex crimes.
Biden rushed to reverse the Trump policies that had gotten the border crisis under control. Not only did the president order an end to border wall construction, but he also ended the “Remain in Mexico” policy that required asylum seekers to remain in Mexico until their cases had been adjudicated. Biden also unilaterally dropped Trump’s “safe third country” deals with Latin American countries like Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador that enabled the U.S. to direct asylum seekers to settle in countries that were safe for them, rather than allowing them into the U.S.
Biden’s campaign rhetoric — promising a deportation moratorium (that got blocked by court order) and health care for illegal aliens, among other things — arguably encouraged migrants to rush to America. Immigrants have come to the border wearing shirts that read, “Biden please let us in!”
Govs. Abbott and Ducey sent out a Hail Mary to the other 48 governors across the United States, requesting aid and warning that without their help, the effects of continued high illegal immigration will spill over into their states.
“Given the staggering number of violations now occurring in Texas and Arizona, additional manpower is needed from any state that can spare it. With your help, we can apprehend more of these perpetrators of state and federal crimes, before they can cause problems in your state,” the governors wrote in a letter released late Thursday.
Abbott and Ducey left the military out of the request because U.S. troops on the border cannot make arrests and typically serve in passive roles.
“We proudly handed the Biden Administration the most secure border in history. All they had to do was keep this smooth-running system on autopilot. Instead, in the span of a just few weeks, the Biden Administration has turned a national triumph into a national disaster,” Trump said in March.
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As the border crisis worsens, Trump’s record on the issue looks better and better. Unfortunately, under Biden, the border states desperately need help dealing with this monumental crisis.
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