Ben Shapiro Interview: Invasion on the Southern Border | 1.28.24

00:03
Speaker 1
The showdown at the southern border between Texas and the Biden administration came to a head this week, and Texas has made it clear it's not backing down.

00:11
Speaker 2
Texas Governor Greg Abbott argues that if the federal government fails to stop the, quote, invasion at the southern border, his state has the constitutional right to step in. In this episode, we talk with Daily Wire editor emeritus bin Shaw Shapiro, whose new documentary series sounds the alarm over the crisis on the southern border. I'm Daily Wire editor in chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's January 20 eigth, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire. Joining us to discuss the rapidly escalating border crisis is Ben Shapiro, Daily wire editor emeritus. Hey, Ben. So I've watched the first episode of your new documentary series, the divided states of Biden, and I'd actually like to start with its title, which gets to the heart of the legal argument Texas governor Greg Abbot is making. You've called the episode invasion on the southern border.

01:06
Speaker 2
Invasion is obviously a loaded term that has constitutional implications in this case. So first, is it fair to call what's happening on the border an invasion?

01:15
Speaker 3
So the part of it that's an invasion is the drug cartels in control of the border. My suggestion is not that illegal immigrants themselves constitute a, quote, unquote, invading force, that somebody who's coming across the border looking for a job or even looking for welfare is the same thing as a soldier coming across the border. It is true, however, the mexican drug cartels are in control of large swaths of the american border, and they are using Joe Biden's loose immigration policy, in fact, non existent immigration policy, in order to smuggle people across the border who do have criminal records, people who do have terrorist records, people who are smuggling huge quantities of fentanyl into America. From that perspective, it is colloquially an invasion.

01:53
Speaker 2
Now, in terms of the legal and constitutional argument, does Abbot actually have to argue that there is, in fact, an invasion to make his case that he must take action to secure the border?

02:02
Speaker 3
No, he doesn't. He doesn't have to claim under the constitutional authority. He can simply say that he should have the ability to reject foreign actors from entering into the United States, and if federal government won't do it, they violated their obligations to protect the border under the Constitution of the United States. Well, it's unclear exactly what the implications are so far of what he has said. There is a bit of a gap between his claim that article one, section ten of the Constitution, covers self defense against invasion and what he's actually doing right now, erecting razor wire on the border is not, in fact, for example, an act of war. He's not treating illegal immigrants who are coming across the border as pows, for example, which is what you do if there's an actual physical invasion.

02:45
Speaker 3
So a lot of the language that's being used here, it's going to be interesting to see a place in the Supreme Court. I don't think it's actually relevant to what he is doing right now. What he is doing right now is fully within the bounds of the law. The Supreme Court ruling recently held that the federal government had the ability and capacity to dismantle razor wire if they sought to do so. But it did not stop Texas from erecting the razor wire in the first place.

03:05
Speaker 2
About that ruling, what do you expect to be the next steps in terms of the courts?

03:09
Speaker 3
I think that the federal government is very likely to try to get an injunction against Abbott for erecting razor wire, for erecting more barriers in, say, the Rio Grande, for putting together shipping containers at the border. And they're going to try to claim that the state troopers are prohibiting the federal agents from enforcing immigration law along the border. They have to show evidence to that effect. They'd have to actually demonstrate, for example, that's what's happening, that border agents are being turned away. They're not being allowed to enter into the state park to carry out what the Supreme Court has said. Basically, this has put Biden in a bit of a box.

03:44
Speaker 3
Either he's going to have to appeal to the Supreme Court on the basis that he wants there to be open border and illegal immigration, or he's going to have to cut some sort of deal with Greg Abbot. Now, the reality is that he's trying to voice this off on Congress. He's trying to say that Congress needs to pass additional legislation in order to enable him to enforce the border. But none of that is true. He could simply put back in place what he dismantled when Donald Trump was president.

04:06
Speaker 3
Things like remain in Mexico, for example, or full scale detention of people who are crossing the border illegally, or reinterpretation of asylum laws such that you'd have to make a colorable showing that you actually deserve asylum, as opposed to simply claiming that you want asylum, which is a big change that Biden made in the law. When Biden came into office, there are two major changes that he made with regard to enforcement of the law. One is he ended remain in Mexico. So if you came to the United States under Donald Trump and then you claimed asylum, the Trump administration would say, you need to wait in Mexico while we adjudicate that claim. Radically cut down on illegal immigration, because, of course, the vast majority of people claiming asylum do not have a legal right to asylum.

04:39
Speaker 3
And so that means that unless they're released into the United States, catch and release, which is what Joe Biden has been doing, then there's no reason to actually arrive at the southern border. Joe Biden got rid of remain in Mexico. The other thing that Joe Biden did is he also got rid of detention. So instead of detaining people indefinitely pending an asylum claim being adjudicated, he started doing catch and release. And he dedicated huge swaths of the border Patrol to engaging in catch and release. People would come across the border, they would claim asylum, a border patrol agent would arrive, take them to a detention facility. Within 72 hours, they're released into the country.

05:12
Speaker 2
Nearly every republican governor has come out in solidarity with Texas, more than two dozen. Now, how important is that unified show of support for Texas?

05:22
Speaker 3
I think it's really important because it demonstrates that, again, there is a broad scale solidarity between many of the states against the federal government's refusal to enforce the law. And remember, what we're seeing here is not the federal government trying to enforce the law and being stopped by states from doing so. What we're seeing here is the federal government refusing to enforce the law and then stepping in to stop states from enforcing federal law, which is a really amazing contention, is that the federal government can simply ignore statutory law that is on the book. The executive branch can do that. And if anyone else tries to effectuate the law, the federal government can then step in. And no, you can't enforce the law because we're not enforcing the law.

05:56
Speaker 2
Right. Really the crux of the issue here. Now, in the making of your new episode for the divided states of Biden series, you traveled to one of the most active areas of the southern border. A lot of attention is on Texas right now, obviously, but Arizona, where you traveled, is also experiencing a full blown crisis. What did you see there?

06:14
Speaker 3
What we saw is an empty border. We went down to a native american reservation. That native american reservation does not have Trump border wall on it because the native american tribe does not want there to be Trump border wall on that part of the border. It's effectively a vehicle barrier that you can physically step over. It's no more than maybe 18 inches tall. So you can literally step from America into Mexico. And what you are seeing is mexican drug cartels dropping off huge swaths of illegal immigrants at specified border points like the San Miguel Gate, which is where we visited, they've seen huge waves of illegal immigration being brought there. And the drug cartels are doing that for two reasons. One, they make a bunch of money off of each person they smuggle across the border.

06:50
Speaker 3
And two, by flooding these particular border areas with illegal immigrants and drawing border patrol there under Joe Biden's auspices in order to process those illegal immigrants, they're leaving huge swaths of the border wide open. So we actually drove 25 miles of the american border, and we saw zero border patrol agents. Normally in that space, you'd have seen six, seven, eight border patrol agents, maybe one. Every couple of miles we saw zero. And because of that also means that even Trump's border wall is vulnerable. So we saw areas where the drug cartels literally soldered directly through the Trump border wall, which just creates a hole in the border wall, and people rush directly through that border wall. The other stuff that we saw, a mexican drug cartel drone that was flying above us is maybe 07:00 at night.

07:31
Speaker 3
And were waiting to kind of see what that night would bring. And we hear a buzing above us. We look up and there's a mexican drug cartel drone. I actually turned to the board of patrol agent, assuming that it was an said, no, that's the cartels. I said, why can't you just shoot that down? And he said, well, we would have to elevate that directly to the head of homeland security in order to do so. And so we're not going to get permission for that again. That's a drug cartel. So the drug cartel is an actual criminal organization that is encroaching over America's border. So when we talk about an invasion, that would be the part. Looks much more like an invasion right now.

07:58
Speaker 2
In the episode, you spent a lot of time interviewing the head of the border Patrol union. What did he tell you about the reality of the situation on the ground and the morale within border patrol?

08:08
Speaker 3
He said that the morale has never been lower. He said that the border Patrol agents sign up so they can stop bad guys from coming in the country and so they can prevent people from crossing the border illegally, even if they're not bad guys. And instead, they've basically been turned into a busing, ferrying and administrative service for illegal immigration en masse. He said he's never seen the border patrol lower than they are right now.

08:26
Speaker 4
The joke is we're no longer the border patrol. We're the welcome patrol. We don't have a problem of getting applicants we have a problem of keeping them. So what happens is they'll come in and they become completely demoralized, completely jaded, and then they'll leave to another law enforcement organization. The US border Patrol has one of the highest attrition rates in the entire federal government. Look, nobody is against legal immigration. None of us want to send somebody back to their country that's going to get murdered or tortured because of their religious affiliation, their political beliefs, or any of the other things that would qualify for asylum. None of us want that. But we also know that the vast majority of these people do not have a legitimate asylum claim.

09:10
Speaker 2
Now, in one particularly powerful moment in this episode, you sat down and spoke with Laura Wilkerson. She's a mother whose son was brutally murdered by an illegal immigrant. Here's a clip from that.

09:21
Speaker 3
So originally, what did they think the motive was? That's why I was.

09:24
Speaker 5
They didn't really have one. The killer told him a lot of motives that were lies. And I found out after the motive was that he wanted Joshua's truck to scrap for some money.

09:34
Speaker 3
And when did they find out that the murderer was in the country illegally?

09:38
Speaker 5
I remember them telling know, I said, where are his parents? And they said to me, we can't ask him. And I said, what do you mean you can't ask him? And he said, well, they're not in the country legally, and we're not allowed to ask them. And so that's when I first understood about sanctuary cities and the policies that are, whether it was a written policy or just a verbal policy about you don't ask people where they're from.

10:02
Speaker 2
What did you learn from your discussion with her?

10:04
Speaker 3
What I learned most of all is obviously the personal impact of illegal immigration can be extraordinarily devastating. A huge number of illegal immigrants cross the border. Most of them are not murderers, but there are some who are. And in this particular case, you had an illegal immigrant who was brought across while he was a minor, and he ends up killing her son, mutilating her son, burning her son's body. And they wouldn't even check immigration status when he had a prior run in with law enforcement just a few months earlier. Sanctuary city status is disastrous. And what I also learned from her is that politicians who are now in favor of border security don't want to hear it. They don't want to meet with her. If they do meet with her, they want to ignore her.

10:42
Speaker 3
There are tons of people who are experiencing tragedies like this one and horrors like this one. In the United States and the media have largely been overlooking all of that in favor of broad statements about why America needs more open borders, why those who are seeking asylum are generally wonderful people. I mean, regardless of whether that's true or not, I mean, the simple fact of the matter is that we have no obligation to bring in a bunch of unvetted people into the country, particularly disproportionately young males. And when a crime occurs because an illegal immigrant has been allowed to cross the border illegally, that is a failure of the federal government, pure and simple.

11:15
Speaker 2
Well said. Final question, what needs to be done right now to begin to actually address this crisis?

11:21
Speaker 3
All of this can be done by Joe Biden tomorrow. The simplest thing that Joe Biden could do is simply restore women in Mexico. That's what the head of the border patrol union told me. He said that by keeping people in Mexico pending asylum hearings, you will cut down illegal immigration by huge amounts. Also, the law needs to be interpreted such that if you claim asylum, you actually have to make a colorable showing that you will actually be granted asylum in order for us to take that seriously. You can't just show up at the border, claim asylum by acting like Michael Scott in the middle of the office shouting, I declare bankruptcy. Which is what people are doing. They're literally crossing the border, throwing up their hands and saying, I fear to go back to my home country.

11:58
Speaker 3
And then they're being processed and led into the interior based simply on that one sentence, which is effectively open sesame. That needs to be changed forth with. This is not a funding problem, is what I was told by Border Patrol. This is not a staffing problem. This is a decision, a political decision by the Biden administration to staff heavily on the administrative and busing and ferrying side, and almost nothing with regards to policing the actual border.

12:19
Speaker 2
Ben, thank you so much for talking with us.

12:21
Speaker 3
You bet. Thanks a lot.

12:22
Speaker 2
That was Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro, whose new documentary on the Border crisis is available now@dailywire.com. And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning WirE.