Political Quotes

“I thank the Senator for making that point with regard to the legislation. We propose to truly put border security first, and I continue to hope the House will take that up. But one of the points that has been made is we have to stem this humanitarian crisis in a way that will actually solve the problem, and that will be solved when parents and relatives in these countries realize that sending their children, unaccompanied minors, is futile, that they will spend a lot of money and it won't work. There is a good example of how we can give effect to this from a couple of years ago. In 2005, the country of Mexico allowed Brazilians to come in on kind of a visa waiver-type program. What happened is a lot of Brazilian nationals came through Mexico and used it as a conduit to come into this country. So we had a huge number of so-called OTMs or other-than-Mexicans coming up, Brazilians, and we were doing what can best be described as catch and release. We would take them back across the border and let them go. That wasn't solving the problem, so the Bush administration decided we needed to solve this problem. The way to actually solve it is to detain these individuals and then send them home to Brazil. We did that. It was an operation called Texas Hold 'Em. After that operation, within 30 days, the number of Brazilians coming through Mexico into this country dropped by 50 percent; within 60 days, that number dropped by 90 percent.…”