BUCK: They’re lying to you about the border. I know it’s not a surprise. I know that I say this and all of us feel this exasperation and frustration. Of course, they’re lying about the border. Kamala Harris. Remember the border czar? Why hadn’t she been to the border, she told us? Well, she stared into the camera and said she’s been to the border.
To which everyone including the people who will do anything to elevate Kamala’s brand — do anything to make it seem like she should be the next president after Biden (whenever that is) of the United States — said, “We can’t actually make it seem like you’ve been to the border, Miss Vice President or Madam Vice president, when you haven’t.”
There are limits to the lies that the media will get away with. But once again, they’re testing those limits because as of today here’s what you got: Thousands of Haitian migrants. Not only have they gathered at this bridge in Del Rio, Texas. Not only are they, in fact, overwhelming the resources of Border Patrol assigned to that area — and, yes, they are not whipping anyone.
The Border Patrol is not engaged in some horrible, inhumane practice of abusing or beating people from horseback. But they’re actually — the Biden administration is — letting thousands of them into the U.S. with a notice to appear in 60-days’ time in court. Clay, before we dive too deep into this, I’m just gonna go out on a limb here.
I don’t think the thousands of Haitian illegal aliens who are being released into the U.S. interior now — this is now confirmed — with a, “Hey, would he show up in court in 60 days?” I think a lot of them aren’t going to show up.
CLAY: Would you? Let’s think about it from their perspective. We still don’t know how in the world all of these Haitians ended up in South America in the first place. We don’t know what suddenly made them decide now is the time to go make a run for the border in Del Rio, Texas. But they’re winning, Buck.
And as soon as you allow them into the United States, they are going to vanish into the larger United States ecosystem. They’re going to have kids; they’re going to have live here potentially for decades, many of them probably for the rest of their lives. And so from their perspective, would you show up in a random court?
You may not speak the English language. You may not be able to understand the apparatus of the court. I wouldn’t show up. I don’t think that very many of our listeners would show up. This is a fundamental failure of the Biden administration, and they are lying to us. Now, the reality is these Haitians are gonna be in an incredible difficult place, right?
They don’t speak the language, necessarily. They don’t really know how our country works. Their ability to find a job and make money is going to be questionable at best, unless they have some family members who might already be here who can help them to understand what to do in the country.
But the bigger context here is, we have shut down legal immigration, by and large, because of covid, and we’ve shut down — up until the past couple of weeks, when we had the new announcement that you could fly in, we shut down — basically international travel to Europe and Asia and most of the countries around the world.
Now we’re allowing those people to come back in but we’re requiring a test. And even, Buck, if you go to Mexico as a tourist and you are an American citizen, you have to have a negative covid test. I believe it’s still in effect. It was when I was down here in the winter. You still have to have a negative covid test to come back; yet we’re allowing all of these tens of thousands of people on a daily basis to come across our border.
BUCK: And you asked the question about how, right? How did they get there?
BUCK: The logistics of this have not yet been fully understood. I know people who are down there at the border —
CLAY: Trying to figure it out.
BUCK: — who are trying to figure it out. Clearly, there was social media coordination. The Mexican drug cartels absolutely had a hand in this and are making a lot of money off of all this, by the way —
CLAY: No doubt.
BUCK: — which just further corrupts the Mexican state and government and police, and then you have more drug cartel activity that goes on. Fentanyl killed tens of thousands of Americans. Total drug overdoses last year was over 90,000, an all-time high. Those drugs are pouring across the border as Border Patrol is overwhelmed.
So we don’t know the logistics yet. But we do know you could say the overall impulse or the rationale behind the thousands and thousands of Haitians all showing up at once is they think they’re going to get into the U.S. Clearly, a lot of them are right, which is why we have been lied to in last few days. The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, is trying to hold the line here and also trying to make sure everyone understands that it is the Biden policies that have led to this. But please, it is Joe Biden who has opened this up.
HARRIS: What I saw depicted about, um, those individuals on horseback treating human beings the way they were is horrible. And, um, I fully support what is happening right now, which is a thorough investigation in exactly what is going on there. Um, but human beings should never be treated that way, and I’m deeply troubled about it.
BUCK: Okay. So that was actually Kamala Harris talking about the situation which did not happen.
CLAY: That is the first thing I’ve heard her say about the border at all. It took an artificial element of this situation in order for Kamala Harris to even speak out, or for most of the members of the Blue Checkmark Brigade — who haven’t mentioned anything at the border since the cages flare up when Donald Trump was there when they tried to blame Trump for putting kids in cages. All of a sudden, this thing comes out, and now Kamala Harris has got an opinion on the border.
BUCK: Well, it’s amazing to me because what us is the story was a lie and then the story very quickly turned into, “Well, even if it didn’t happen, let’s have a conversation about how sad things are for the migrants that have gathered there.” So they use the emotional impulse of the story on this to get the subject matter to change. We do have, though, Governor Abbott on the Biden administration promoting this. Here he is.
ABBOTT: President Biden campaigned on having open borders in the United States. I’m sure most people when they heard President Biden either when he was a candidate or as president talk about open borders, they had no idea it would lead to the type of chaos that we’ve witnessed just behind me for day after day after day.
Contrary to what Kamala Harris talked about trying to solve this problem in the Northern Triangle, what the world is witnessing now is the open border policies that are being utilized by the Biden administration. It attracts people from across the entire globe including people coming from more than 150 different countries.
BUCK: Clay, that’s actually why it’s happening, right? How it’s happening we’re stilling finding out. Why it’s happening is the Biden administration has kicked the border wide open as a matter of policy, as a matter of choice. This is not a surprise to anybody who understands why people show up and come into America legally and how they do it.
CLAY: Well, and look, they took the cue. Again, what I think we need to figure out is how the Haitians got here and why they chose to come right now. We’ve seen these sorts of caravans before, but usually it’s from people who are just making their way to the United States border who were already in Mexico or Latin America or wherever they may be. That makes more sense to me.
This feels like a calculated attempt made by, frankly, people who’ve assessed and looked at the political situation and either decided, “Hey, we’re going to put so much pressure on the Biden administration that they essentially let us in,” because, Buck, this is what… You see some of these reports.
There are just Haitians now hanging out at gas stations all over Texas getting dropped off in buses, and they’re claiming that they’re putting these guys back on airplanes and sending them back to Haiti, and they’ve done that with a small minority of the overall population, but it seems like a substantially portion of these would-be immigrants illegally cross the Rio Grande and now they’re into Texas and will probably be in our country for decades now.
CLAY: Yeah. A cheat sheet.
BUCK: Cheat sheets. It’s a cheat sheet where they say, “I fear in my own country that I will have violence against me,” and they’re learning different ways to get through the system. But you have to add to all that the Biden administration has effectively destroyed interior enforcement of immigration laws. So you’ve all these sanctuary jurisdictions across the country, and they act like there’s still rule of law there when it comes to immigration.
There absolutely is not. The Biden team, the Biden Immigration and Customs Enforcement leadership and DHS isn’t going to in any way enforce immigration laws against people that don’t show up for these hearings. They’re not gonna make them a priority. The only people who will get deported are serious violent criminals in some instances, Clay — and not even all of the serious violent criminals who are illegal aliens will be deported.
And then they’ll turn the point to a number and they’ll say, “See? We’re still enforcing the law.” No, they’re not. So if you get into the U.S., you are basically home free. You’re done. You don’t have to worry anymore. And the Haitian migrants — and, by the way, it’s not just Haitians. There’s Cubans and there’s Venezuelans and there’s others in this encampment.
They know this, Clay, obviously, ’cause that’s why they showed up. For the last 72 hours what has the media been saying, “Oh, the Biden administration is not going to let them in. They’re going to apply the rule of law,” and now that we find that’s a lie; thousands have been let into the United States. “What’s a few more thousand tomorrow?” is gonna be the narrative.
CLAY: And not only that, Buck, what happens when they get let into the United States? They get their phones, and they text their friends and they call their family members back in other countries and say, “Hey, we got into United States! We’re here now. Here’s what you need to do to come as well.” So when you allow anybody illegally into the United States, that leads to a further impetus for all these other people to recognize that they can also get into the United States illegally.
And, by the way, it’s important to recognize, this had basically come to a close under the Trump administration. The Trump administration had enforced the rule of law at the border such that we had seen historic lows, generational lows in migrants crossing the border because they were aware of how much more difficult it had been.
As soon as Joe Biden gets into office, all of this starts up anew. And we are seeing it occur at rates that haven’t happened in a generation now. We’ve gone from generational low of illegal immigration to generational high in illegal immigration in less than a year.
BUCK: That’s an excellent point. We should come back to what the Biden administration is saying about this in a moment, and we also have what Biden’s not saying, Clay, because the press doesn’t actually ask him any questions.
CLAY: They won’t talk to anybody.
BUCK: This is a problem, surges at the border. It did happen under Trump and they solved it. They figured out how to stop it. And then the Biden administration came in and said, “Let’s unsolve the problem,” because they don’t want to solve the problem.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
CLAY: Joe Biden was asked about the situation at the border and whether or not it was under control. And he at least acknowledged that the border is not under control. Let’s play cut 3.
REPORTER: Mr. President, what’s your reaction to the images at the southern border?
BIDEN: Get it under control!
REPORTER: Is it under control or you have it under control?
BIDEN: We will get it under control!
CLAY: So do you buy into the question here? Do you buy into in any way that the Joe Biden administration is gonna get the border under control, or do you think — as I believe and I would imagine almost everybody out there believes as well, Buck — that what they’re looking for is for the media to pretend that the border is not under control and go back to covering everything else?
And this is where, Buck, I have to say, the Biden White House has so many different fires burning on so many different levels of incompetence that they may be able to dodge responsibility on the border simply because so many other things are going wrong, too, it’s hard to focus just to the border.
BUCK: Well, the day-to-day numbers at the border are awful if you believe in an immigration system rooted in the rule of law, right? But you can’t… A hundred in the Del Rio sector and a hundred in the Tucson sector and a thousand in the Tijuana/San Diego sector or San Diego corridor. All these different places, day in and day out, you can’t visualize that, Clay.
The problem here is very much one of optics, because you have so many thousands and thousands of people gathered in one place, you can show this, and it feels real. The number looks real. When you got an athletic stadium full of illegal aliens all gathered together at one point along the border, it feels not only like…
Well, you can see it, but also this is all very deliberate. This is not just a thing that kind of happening and a problem to deal with. There are movements that are ongoing to get people to the border, to get them into the United States. I’m sure if you did some of the looking into the funding here and some of the organization, you’d probably find there are some international NGOs who might have a hand in helping along the way.
You’ll find out that there are people that are actually very much in favor of this. And here’s the problem with the Biden administration, what you’re saying about so many fires burning, so many problems. Clay, they have no explanation for this. They can keep trying, but there’s no talking point that makes this go away.
CLAY: That’s the truth, and what they’re relying on… I was thinking as you talked about the different numbers of illegals coming across the border, imagine if we had a daily count of illegal immigrants entering into our country like we did covid infections.
How much different would that be if instead of every single day knowing how many people have tested positive for covid, if we were seeing all of the thousands of people who were illegally entering our country on a day-to-day basis? That would be pretty fascinating, I think, to see how it would play out in general. And, you know, maybe we need to start thinking that.
Tune in for a Christmas Eve Special with Clay and Buck — original content from…
Clay used his last hour on the air in 2024 to reflect on his trip…
What were the worst media takes of 2024? Watch Clay pick his.
Clay broadcast from Israel. Take a look at the photos and videos he has shared…
The Kentucky senator shares his thoughts on finally bringing some accountability to government.
The future WH press secretary covers it all.