Sen. Cruz on the Border Crisis, Milley — and Covid Racism

CLAY: We bring in now from the great state of Texas one of their senators, Ted Cruz, the man who had a good deal of success at the poker table alongside me. Have you heard, Senator, yet when our great poker match is gonna air on television?

SEN. CRUZ: You know, Clay, I haven’t heard. They said about a month, but I don’t think they have a firm date yet.

CLAY: Yeah, we haven’t heard yet. We’ll let you guys know ’cause I think people will joy that. We had a great table. All right. What’s not going great, Senator — and I appreciate you coming on with us, ’cause Buck and I wanted to talk about this, and it’s absolutely perfect timing. There’s viral drone footage from down along the border showing thousands of people right outside of our border trying to cross. You obviously represent the state of Texas and are well informed with what’s going on down along the Texas border. How bad is it? What is Biden doing? And what is the solution that we could have here, based on your understanding of the situation?

SEN. CRUZ: Well, it is horrific. The video that has gone viral is of the Del Rio bridge and there are over 8,000 illegal immigrants that are gathered there. Many of them are Haitian, and the processing center is simply overwhelmed. We’ve had well over a million illegal immigrants cross since Joe Biden became president.

We’re on a pace to have over two million cross this year. You know, I was down at the border just a couple of weeks ago. And the volume is massive. It is overwhelming everything. It is a humanitarian crisis. It’s a public health crisis. It’s a national security crisis. The Donna tent facility, which are the Joe Biden cages where there are thousands upon thousands of little boys and little girls just crammed in those cages.

When I was down there a couple of weeks ago, the rate of covid positivity in the Donna cages is over 22%. And this is all the direct result of Biden and Harris, their open-border policies. Every child trafficker, every human trafficker, every narcotics trafficker in the world has heard Biden’s message that the borders are open, and they’re coming in massive, massive numbers.

BUCK: Senator Cruz, it’s Buck. Do you see this stopping at any point? Is there any reason…? I mean, I remember when the so-called the conventional wisdom at the beginning of this year certainly from the Biden camp was, “Oh, well, over the summer, you’ll see a big diminution. You’ll see a big draw-down of far fewer people doing the illegal crossings.” It turned out that was not the case.

We had 208,000 last month. We’re having 200,000 a month now through the summer months it seems and on pace for well over a million illegals entering the United States this year. It’s gonna be closer to 1.5 or two million. What stops the situation? Are we just at the point now where the Democrat Party feels like it’s worth it to take whatever heat they get in order to get the votes in the long term?

SEN. CRUZ: Well, that’s a big part of a it, that Biden and Harris made promises to the radical left, to the open-borders left, and the promises they made were that they would not enforce the border. No matter what, it would be open borders. And so the challenge they face is they have no way to fix this crisis ’cause they have created it.

And what they’re counting on is corrupt corporate media simply refusing to cover it. And, by and large, the major networks and CNN, they don’t cover it. You know, if you watch Fox News, if you watch Newsmax or OAN or you listen to your show, you know about what is happening at the border. But if you watch CNN, there is no border crisis!

It simply doesn’t exist, because the corporate media are willing to be propagandists. And the Biden administration is counting on that. And the frustrating thing is we know how to fix this. We don’t have to ask hypothetically. Last year, just one year ago, we had the lowest rate of illegal immigration in 45 years.

And what produced that was an agreement that President Trump negotiated with Mexico. It was called the Remain in Mexico agreement. It worked incredibly well. And on his first day in my office, Joe Biden ripped that international agreement to shreds, and we went from the lowest rate of illegal immigration in 45 years last year to this year the highest rate of illegal immigration in over 20 years.

And they don’t intend to change, even though a federal court has now ordered them — the Biden administration — to return to the Remain in Mexico policy. They are effectively defying the federal court and defying the U.S. Supreme Court, which left that court ruling in place.

CLAY: Senator Cruz, there’s so much going on that is incompetence from the Biden administration at a high level. We just asked you about the border. But I want to ask you about what’s going on right now with General Milley. We know what a failure Afghanistan was. But the reports in Bob Woodward’s book that he was back channeling with China regarding not being willing to follow Donald Trump’s orders if necessary. How alarmed should Americans be by that revelation, presuming that it’s true? And should we have an investigation of some sort to figure out exactly what General Milley did and when he did it?

SEN. CRUZ: Well, I think we should be very alarmed. But I want to start with noting that Bob Woodward has a long history of having quotes in his book, some of which are accurate and some of which are not. And so I don’t think we should jump to conclusions. I don’t think we should assume the quotes are accurate. I think General Milley deserves the chance to defend himself.

He deserves the chance to answer and to answer under oath before the United States Congress whether in fact he did what Woodward alleges. If Woodward is right, what Woodward alleges that General Milley called the leading general of the Chinese communist military and said that if President Trump ordered a military strike, that he and the other generals would resist that and that he would inform the Chinese government of any military conflict before it happened.

If that occurred, it is deeply, deeply concerning. It would be a gross dereliction of duty. It would be breaking the chain of command. Our Constitution establishes civilian control of the military. And for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to defy that would be deeply concerning. But I think General Milley deserves the chance to address it directly and defend himself and answer whether that is true or not.

BUCK: You also have, in your capacity as a lawyer, argued at the very highest court many times in the past. I wanted to know what your analysis is, what your assessment — obviously, also as a sitting U.S. senator — of the Biden vaccine mandate/testing requirement that’s going into effect here and OSHA putting out this ruling. Is it constitutional? What do you think?

SEN. CRUZ: The Joe Biden vaccine mandate is flatly illegal and unconstitutional. It is contrary to federal law. The president has no authority to order Americans to take a vaccine for covid, and he has no authority to order employers to force their employees to do so. They are trying to do so through an OSHA regulation. OSHA is the Occupational Safety Hazard Administration.

It regulates dangers at the workplace, things like asbestos. It doesn’t have any authority over your personal health care decisions, which should be between you and your doctor. Now, Biden issued this mandate for two incredibly cynical reasons. Reason number one is they desperately wanted to change the subject from Afghanistan.

Afghanistan was such an absolute disaster. It’s the worst foreign policy catastrophe in a generation. And it was the first issue on which Biden was getting criticized, not just by Republicans but by Democrats and even by the press. And the corporate media have been Biden’s biggest defenders, and they turned on him in Afghanistan.

And the Biden White House knew that if they issued this vaccine mandate that, like sheep, the corporate media would circle the White House and defend it. And that’s exactly what they’re doing. And so they, number one, wanted to change the topic from Afghanistan. But number two, Joe Biden knows this is illegal.

The Biden White House knows this is illegal. Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, retweeted a comment that this is just a work-around — that was the term that was used — a work-around around federal law. But what they’re counting on is that millions of people will obey before the litigation can be over. Typically, litigation takes months or even years.

And by the time this order gets thrown out in court, an awful lot of people will have simply complied — and I will say, sadly, for a lot of Big Business there are a lot of big businesses in America today that are eager to comply to force their employees to get vaccinated and to tell their employees, “Hey, it’s not my fault. I’m just following federal law,” and so it’s really Joe Biden in bed with the giant Big Business corporations.

CLAY: Senator Cruz, I know you’ve seen some of the videos that are going viral. We talked about that to start the show. The situation in Target where some random guy is hectoring a woman who’s not wearing a mask. Also, a black family in New York being kicked out of a restaurant for not being able to show their vaccine papers.

Have we created — and has the Biden administration aided and abetted — an otherness association here where we are treating people who are unvaccinated or might have natural immunity but have not had a traditional vaccine as second-class citizens, and how do we rectify that, if you agree that that’s starting to occur?

SEN. CRUZ: Clay, I think that absolutely is occurring, that there is a polarization and division in our society and that Joe Biden and the Democrats are pouring gasoline on those fires and dividing us. The video in New York, you tweeted it out. I actually retweeted you. It’s a horrific video of a black man with his family being denied the right to have a meal, being told, “If you don’t have your vaccination papers, get out!” And he observes… He said he and his family had a religious exemption from doing it. The New York restaurant didn’t care, but even more disturbing were all of the patrons of that restaurant.

CLAY: Yes.

SEN. CRUZ: And it was striking. They were almost all white. They’re presumably white liberals. One of them flips the bird at him.

CLAY: Yep.

SEN. CRUZ: And I got to say when I retweeted you, Clay, I put the #LiberalsAreRacist Because what you’re seeing is white liberals who feel so holier-than-thou; so morally superior that you’ve got a bunch of rich white guys being willing to insult and attack and throw out a black family — and, by the way, if you look at the racial breakdowns on vaccinations, African-Americans and Hispanics are getting vaccinations at a much lower rate.

And these rich, white liberal politicians are saying essentially “whites only” if you want to go to a restaurant in New York, whites only if you want to go to a Dodgers game in Los Angeles. And they don’t care because they’re willing to be so holier-than-thou that it is a crusade and anyone who doesn’t obey their edict is an evildoer. And this is a really dangerous phenomenon, I think, in our society.

BUCK: Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Sir, we always appreciate when you make the time for us, and we’ll talk to you again soon.

SEN. CRUZ: Thank you, guys. I appreciate it. Anyone who wants to dive into these topics more, my podcast is Verdict with Ted Cruz. Verdict with Ted Cruz. We do it every week, and we’re diving into them at great length.

CLAY: There we go. Appreciate it.

BUCK: Check it out, everybody. Thanks so much, sir.