Republican Rep. Barry Moore of Alabama criticized the Democratic Party on Newsmax for creating opportunities for drug trafficking across the southern border.
Moore told "The Chris Salcedo Show" on Friday that migrants have two ways to cross the border.
"These people have to pay passage to the drug cartel. ... And there you have two ways: You can either pay them for passage, or you can smuggle drugs. If you don't want to smuggle the drugs, you're going to be a slave to the system and make payments to the cartel. They know where your family is in Mexico, and there will be repercussions if you don't make the payments," he said.
Moore is concerned that while drugs and even sex trafficking are infiltrating communities in the United States, some Democratic lawmakers are also pushing for a "defund the police" initiative — which he asserts could compound the problem.
"A closed border is a compassionate border," Moore said.
So far in fiscal 2021, Customs and Border Protection has had 726,401 encounters with immigrants; that number is already higher than the total number of encounters they had in all of 2020, which was 405,036.
"And the CBP [Customs and Border Protection] estimate we're gonna have 2 million people cross the border this year. And you know they're not being tested [for COVID-19]. We don't know if they've got COVID. We don't know where they're coming from: In many cases Iraq, Syria, the Middle East, and then further south in the triangle nations, down in Guatemala, El Salvador, where MS-13 is really strong, and so we're allowing these people to pour into our communities as we defund the police."