Last Thursday, Republican Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds told WHO radio in Des Moines that she declined a request by the Biden administration to house illegally present foreign minors. Reynolds became the first GOP governor in the nation to refuse a temporary housing request for illegals trafficked by international drug cartels in league with Communist China to destabilize the United States. She models behavior more lawmakers would be prudent to heed.
“This is not our problem,” Reynolds said, in addition to noting that Iowa does not have the resources to provide temporary housing for the U.S. Department of Housing and Human Services to use. “This is the president’s problem. He’s the one that has opened the border, and he needs to be responsible for this and he needs to stop it.”
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen said on Fox News in March that he has no room for migrants to be relocated to his state. That was after a leaked email showed U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) was targeting northern states to house foreign citizens illegally trafficked into the United States at taxpayer expense. Knudsen told The Federalist that Reynolds has got it “absolutely right.”
“When these migrants are interviewed when they get here, they all say the same thing: ‘Biden told us to come by and said we’re welcome.’ I think that’s a messaging failure on the President’s part,” Knudsen said in an interview.
The Iowa Department of Human Services notified the Biden administration on March 31 that the state would not permit the federal government to fly migrants in. The state cited the state government’s need to prioritize American “children first,” even though the White House has inevitably fostered this “incredibly saddening and difficult situation.”
“This is due to limited resources and administrative concerns. We have an obligation to take care of our children first and absent the resources or a clear and comprehensive plan for federal support, we were unable to accommodate the request,” the agency said in a statement to the White House. “We acknowledge this is an incredibly saddening and difficult situation.”
In March, The Washington Post reported that CBP requested the Biden administration grant airplanes to transport migrants across the United States due to a surge in border crossings. At the time, the CBP cited 4,500 unaccompanied children and teenagers held in detention facilities and tent sites.
Shortly after, documents showed more than 5,000 unaccompanied children being held rather than returned to their home countries. In March, CBP reported an estimated 19,000 unaccompanied minors arrived at the border, with 172,000 people combined coming in, effectively making for the largest influx of illegal immigrants in more than 20 years.
The latest data from the government shows Border Patrol agents are allowing 1,000 illegal aliens to come in each day. The CBP currently projects 184,000 migrant children will cross the border in fiscal year 2021. “We’ve never seen anything like this before,” an agent told Fox News on April 2.
Iowa state Rep. Eddie Andrews, who sits on the Public Safety Committee, told The Federalist that he supports a “strong, independent governor,” which Reynolds has demonstrated herself to be.
Reynolds is reacting in a commonsense way to incentivize the Biden White House to discourage illegal migration used to weaken the United States by international criminal cartels and foreign adversaries such as China. The Biden administration has opened 11 facilities in states along the border to fly minors because of its policy failings.
While Reynolds stood up for her state against federal intervention, Democratic-run Michigan is opening an emergency facility for up to 240 migrant children to live. This decision was in alignment with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s decision in June to sustain migrant housing for agricultural workers with taxpayer money.
Matt Seely of the Michigan Conservative Coalition told The Federalist that his organization is “dumbfounded” that a state struggling economically due to lockdowns would divert public resources this way. In the past year, the number of Michigan children in foster care has increased.
“Why are we taking on people that have never been immunized and that we don’t know anything about their health,” Seely said. “Our whole focus should be getting Michigan healthy and opening our state.”
Nationwide, 275 sheriffs signed a letter last week urging Biden to secure the U.S. border and take action against the influx of illegal immigration. Ten of these individuals were from counties in Iowa. Cerro Gordo County Sheriff Kevin Pals told The Federalist that after the letter went to Biden, some of the Arizona sheriffs who signed the letter met with the Biden administration. He added that the White House loosened border security “out of hatred for President Trump.”
“It appears to me that the Biden administration is just trying to reverse everything that President Trump did out of hatred for President Trump,” Pals said. “I don’t think it has anything to do with the middle class or the people in Iowa. They need to change their mission to be about the safety of the people of the United States.”
On Sunday, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas called on the White House to reinstate former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, which deterred illegal crossings. Abbott referenced Biden’s decision in January to repeal the government’s “remain in Mexico” asylum policy that required migrants to wait until their court date before crossing the border. Since its inception in January 2019, 67,000 migrants were enrolled. Abbott said Biden could send “a stronger message that” illegals should not be coming instead of wavering.
“President Biden alone caused this border crisis and he alone has the responsibility to stop it,” Minority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, who visited the Donna, Texas migrant facility on Saturday and shared videos on social media of overcrowding, told The Federalist. “No governor should be forced to solve the problem that President Biden created with his reckless executive orders. President Biden created this crisis at the border, and President Biden needs to stop passing the buck and fix this problem today.”
