Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, told Newsmax Thursday that many of the Venezuelans overwhelming the southern border at El Paso, Texas, are "bad actors" who have been released deliberately by the Venezuelan government and sent north.
"This is very reminiscent of what Fidel Castro did a few years ago, trying to empty out his prisons in Cuba," Babin said during an appearance on Newsmax's "American Agenda." "All the evidence points to the fact that Venezuela is emptying their prisons, sending their worst, their very worst miscreants up to the United States through Mexico. And, of course, the United States has no repatriation agreement with Venezuela; so it's almost impossible to deport these people back to their country of origin.
"Let me just say this: 20,000 people coming across in one city, in El Paso, Texas — it's just incredible when you think about it," the Lone Star State congressman continued. "Many of them are bad, bad actors. And so the Department of State needs to put pressure on the countries along the route from South America so that these countries can start deporting these Venezuelans back to their own country, since we don't have a repatriation agreement with them."
Stressing that the U.S. needs to keep its citizens safe from migrants entering the country illegally, Babin said that the Biden administration has "done away with safe third-country agreements, asylum cooperative agreements that had been negotiated and created under President [Donald] Trump.
"This administration has thrown the American people and our national security simply to the wolves," he added.
The Texas Republican also said that, like the mayors of New York City, Washington, D.C. and Chicago, the mayor of El Paso had previously welcomed migrants. Now, Babin said, El Paso's mayor has been shipping migrants out of the city, just as the affluent people of Martha's Vineyard promptly did when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently flew 50 migrants there.
"El Paso simply has been welcoming this type of entry across the border illegally for a long time; and now they're being swamped, absolutely swamped," Babin said. "They're now hypocritically loading these folks up on buses and sending them out again."
According to Babin, "we have 100,000 deaths a year from drugs coming over the border" under the Biden administration.
And it's not just American deaths that are occurring, the congressman said.
"[Nearly] 750 people, migrants themselves — of their bodies — have been recovered on the American side," he said. "It's incredible what we're having: the mayhem, the deaths, the rapes, the children who are being sexually molested.
"All evidence points that many of these kids are going to so-called families that the [Department of Health and Human Services] is not doing DNA tests on, not doing any kind of criminal background checks on," Babin continued. "You hate to even use your imagination to think about what's happening to some of these kids that are coming into our country illegally."