(USA Features) Rep. Nicole Malliotakis said Wednesday that the Biden administration should apply its policy of sending Cubans and Haitians back to their home countries if they are caught trying to enter U.S. waters on rafts to migrants crossing illegally at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The New York Republican was responding to comments Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas made earlier, in which he warned Haitians and Cubans not to try and come to the U.S. to escape worsening crises in their own countries because they would be sent back if caught.
“Allow me to be clear: if you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States,” Mayorkas told a press conference on Tuesday.
Malliotakis told Newsmax TV that “seems like a message that he should be saying at the southern border right now where you have mass migration, including those individuals who are drug dealers, convicted felons, human sex traffickers who are streaming over, even terrorists on the FBI watch list.
“They’re actually releasing criminals back into United States of America, as opposed to sending them home,” she added.
“What I would say if anyone deserves to have asylum, it’s those who are trying to escape a murderous, communist regime like the Castro regime,” she continued.
She went on to observe “I can’t really explain why” the Biden administration has taken a stronger stance against illegal immigration from Cuba and Haiti versus migrants coming illegally from Central America.
I hope it’s not a political reason like Cubans happen to vote Republican when they do arrive here because they don’t want to see socialism come to the United States of America,” said the New York freshman lawmaker.
“But what I’ll say is, we need to be very clear when it comes to the southern border, when it comes to these dangerous attempts to come to the United States of America from Cuba, that we have a process in place and that process must be followed. Our laws must be respected,” she told Newsmax TV’s “National Report.”
She also said that what “the administration can and should be doing at this time is working through the United Nations Security Council through the Human Rights Council
“Use that international community to put pressure on these bad actors to help the situation in Cuba right now,” Malliotakis advised.
“These are people that are suffering immensely, they don’t have access to food, medicine, daily things like soap and toilet paper,” she continued.
“We need to have a humanitarian effort here to not only deliver supplies and push the regime, [but] to allow us to get to the people instead of them taking everything.”