Sen. Steve Daines said the overwhelming number of immigrants crossing the southern border is having a devastating effect on his northern border state of Montana, telling Newsmax TV that drugs and human trafficking are inundating the “Big Sky Country.”
“We border Canada in Montana,” Daines said on “Spicer and Co.” on Tuesday. “The reason it’s a southern border crisis for us up in Montana is the drugs that are pouring into our state.”
Relating a story told to him only an hour earlier, Daines said a sheriff in Montana had seven Mexican cartel members in his jail as they spoke.
“What’s happening, as you have all these illegals coming across the southern border, it’s a zero-sum game,” he explained. “You’ve got [the] border patrol chasing the illegals. That opens up gaps to make it easier to get methamphetamines, fentanyl, and heroin across the southern border.
“It’s coming into Montana. It’s flooding our communities, destroying families, destroying our communities. And no longer is this handed off from cartels to third party, it’s literally the Mexican cartels are setting up shop in Montana because we have such a porous southern border.”
Additionally, Daines claimed that human traffickers are doing a thriving business.
“Our southern border is porous,” the first-term, 58-year-old Republican said. “And here are the winners. The winners of what’s going on are these Mexican cartels. We estimate with human trafficking, at the moment, they’re making $14 million a day last month in human trafficking by these cartels. These cartels are multibillion-dollar operations.”
The Customs and Border Protection agency reported in February that 100,000 illegal aliens were caught attempting to enter the United States from Mexico. That was a nearly one-third jump from the previous month and a three-fold increase from the same month last year.
“The cause of all this is President (Joe) Biden,” Daines said. “This is cause and effect. The first two policies on Jan. 20, he stopped the wall construction and reversed ‘Remain in Mexico.’ I talked to one of my Republican colleagues who’s down on the Arizona border a couple of weeks ago. When they stopped building the wall, they left some openings for gates. But they didn’t complete the gates. So you have miles of wall then these openings.
“They were going to complete it with the gates, but when Biden signed the executive order they can’t install the gates. So, you have these gaping holes right now in the wall. It’s absolutely ridiculous.”