Dan Crenshaw shares videos of him touring border in a helicopter, says situation is ‘unstable’

Crenshaw added that the state of Texas has been forced to pick up the bill for the federal government’s lack of enforcement at the border.

“The state of Texas has to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to take up the slack,” Crenshaw said. “Texas has to fund Operation Drawbridge. They’ve got to fund an operation to secure Texas, which means, in practical terms, they’ve got to fund camera systems; they’ve got to fund the personnel and the officers to go try to catch drug traffickers that are getting through because CBP is dealing with 100 migrant families at a time. Why? Because the Biden administration basically decided that they don’t really want to enforce the law anymore, and that creates a backend for more and more people to come across. Why? Because they get a bus ticket, and they get to go wherever they want even if they have a positive drug test. We’re going to get to the bottom of this.”

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“The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) today announced that Operation Drawbridge — the law enforcement initiative using motion-detection camera system along the Texas-Mexico border — was responsible for more than 29,300 apprehensions and 88,400 pounds of drugs being seized in 2014,” Crenshaw continued.

The GOP lawmaker included videos of himself taking a helicopter tour above the border, which showed stretches of border wall with large unfinished gaps as construction equipment sat untouched nearby.

“Spent the whole morning with the Texas Department of Public Safety,” Crenshaw said. “The reason I did that this morning was because I wanted to demonstrate how much work Texas has to do, how much Texas has to foot the bill for the crisis we have at the border so often.”

“There’s a reason for that, and this is sort of how it works,” Crenshaw continued. “When Border Patrol gets overwhelmed with migrants, especially migrant families and unaccompanied children just turning themselves in because they know they’ll get released into the interior, what happens is there’s huge swaths of territory that’s just left unchecked. The Border Patrol cannot control the border, so you need to rely on state authorities to do that. That’s why we were just out in the boat on the maritime unit; we were out in the helicopter and the aviation unit. Texas invests a lot of money in this, hundreds of millions of dollars a year to help out, and they’ve got a great working relationship with Border Patrol.”

Crenshaw said the situation is approaching crisis levels already, with some officials there expecting things to get worse in the near future.

“Look, in these areas, you’re seeing a huge spike; just leaving the station just now, they’re calling it a crisis,” Crenshaw said. “It’s unprecedented; that’s a factual description. Over 6,000 migrants apprehended just this month in that one station. That’s just one station along the border in Texas, the Rio Grande city station. And they expect that to possibly double within the next month — that’s just the trend that they’re seeing.”

Crenshaw also pointed to drug smugglers using the large volume of migrants to distract Customs and Border Protection agents, allowing them to smuggle more drugs across the border.

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“What’s causing this?” Crenshaw asked. “First of all, it’s important to note that drug smugglers play a huge part of this; they know how to distract CBP. They do it on purpose. You can’t cross the border unless you pay a toll to a drug smuggler; you just can’t do it. They don’t let you. They also monitor migrants on this side of the border as well. They have stash houses all throughout; they have an entire system in place. It’s part of their human smuggling network as well. Often children get smuggled as a result of this, of labor smuggling. So, there’s lots of different forms of human trafficking. But the point is you’re distracting Border Patrol, and that means that it’s easier for the drug cartels to get their drugs in between.”

Crenshaw’s videos came as Republican Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas will deploy National Guard troops to combat the crisis along the border.

“The crisis at our southern border continues to escalate because of Biden Administration policies that refuse to secure the border and invite illegal immigration,” said Abbott. “Texas supports legal immigration but will not be an accomplice to the open border policies that cause, rather than prevent, a humanitarian crisis in our state and endanger the lives of Texans. We will surge the resources and law enforcement personnel needed to confront this crisis.”

President Biden has also asked senior officials later to travel to the border in order to brief him on the matter.

“President Biden has asked senior members of his team to travel to the border region in order to provide a full briefing to him on the government response to the influx of unaccompanied minors and an assessment of additional steps that can be taken to ensure the safety and care of these children,” White House spokesman Vedant Patel said last week.