CNN host Chris Cuomo on Monday night said there was a border crisis, acknowledging that there have been more border crossings in the last month than there have been during any month in the last decade.
Cuomo hosted his show, Cuomo Prime Time, from the U.S.-Mexico border in Hidalgo, Texas, where he talked about how U.S. immigration law was negatively affecting the role of border agents and forcing them to free apprehended illegal aliens into American communities.
"The numbers tell you the story. There are believed to be more crossings in just the last month here than any month in over a decade," Cuomo said. "As I sad, here in Hidalgo, Texas in the Rio Grande Valley, this is the hot spot. Right behind us is Mexico. It's actually this weird area where Mexico is actually north of Texas, the way the land bends around. The authorities say they have never faced the combination of threats, challenges, and federal inaction that they are facing right now."
.@ChrisCuomo: This migrant situation is called a "crisis," but that word is overused. It doesn't do the situation justice.
It's not easy to see what's happening, but the only thing harder is to realize what isn't happening: Shameful inaction. pic.twitter.com/ctB2i9apt6
— Cuomo Prime Time (@CuomoPrimeTime) April 2, 2019
Cuomo then hit President Trump and said that he should be doing more than just cutting funds to the countries involved in illegal immigration and closing the southern border before taking a thinly veiled shot at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) for saying," It's certainly not immoral to build barriers where they are needed." Pelosi said back in December that Democrats were not going to fund Trump's "immoral" border wall.
Cuomo met up with Deputy Chief Patrol Agent Raul Ortiz during his show to discuss the border crisis on the southern border. Ortiz said that border patrol isn't in the "detention business," adding that they are security experts and that their role is to apprehend, process, and turn over immigrants to other agencies.
"So it’s a domino effect: you can only keep them 20 days; you don’t have the resources to keep this many people anyway, so you’ve got to get rid of them; you’ve got to let them go. That gets perceived as weakness. Now you’re doing catch-and-release again," Cuomo said. "That feeds the chance that, ‘We [i.e. migrants] should come [to the US] because we have a good chance of getting through the system because they’re overwhelmed.’ And it just keeps going."
"We’re at double our capacity right now. I don’t have enough medics. I don’t have enough Border Patrol agents to ensure that these folks are getting processed within the 48 hours that we should be processing them. We’re having to keep people in custody longer," Ortiz said. "Our agents are getting assaulted, potentially could be a liability or even one of the individuals in custody could be assaulted. And detention facilities are overcrowded."
Cuomo's call for urgency on the southern border strikes a different tone from CNN's White House correspondent Jim Acosta, who filmed himself in McAllen, TX saying that he doesn't "see anything resembling a national emergency situation" during a visit to the southern border in January.
I found some steel slats down on the border. But I don’t see anything resembling a national emergency situation.. at least not in the McAllen TX area of the border where Trump will be today. pic.twitter.com/KRoLdszLUu
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) January 10, 2019