Sen. Ted Cruz clapped back at President Joe Biden over the latter’s updated National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking.
Namely, the Texas Republican would like the president to focus more on the border.
“How ‘bout secure the damn border?” Cruz tweeted in response to the anti-trafficking effort.
How ‘bout secure the damn border?
— Ted Cruz
Biden’s plan to hone in on human trafficking includes a “new focus on gender and racial equity and workers’ rights,” according to .
“Human trafficking is a stain on our society’s conscience and an affront to the ideals that form the basis of our national strength: liberty, justice, equality, and opportunity,” Biden said in a statement on Friday, the report noted.
Cruz has regularly clashed with the administration over its lax border policies.
Last month, for instance, Cruz questioned Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on the Biden administration’s immigration policies.
During his first round of questioning, “Mayorkas could not provide data on the conditions in immigration detention facilities, the crime caused by dangerous human trafficking, or how many COVID-positive illegal aliens the Biden administration has released into the United States. In his second round of questioning, Sec. Mayorkas refused to answer for the Biden administration’s proposed policy of paying illegal immigrants,” according to a press release from Cruz’s office.
Cruz commented about the discussion in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity after the hearing:
“So I asked Secretary Mayorkas, ‘How many kids have been put in the Biden cages?’ He didn’t know. I asked him, ‘How many people coming here illegally have died, had been abandoned to die in the desert by the coyotes?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’
I asked him, ‘How many women being trafficked in by human traffickers have been sexually assaulted?’ He said, ‘I didn’t know.’ I asked him, ‘How many of the children, of the over 100,000 children that are brought in by human traffickers, how many of them have been sexually assaulted?’ He said he didn’t know.
READ MORE: Ted Cruz: Kamala Harris Avoiding the Border ‘Almost Like a Comedy Show’
He went on to say he believes that the Biden administration is intentionally allowing the border to be inundated with illegal border crossings.
I’ve got to tell you, in Texas, we’re paying the price. When I’m down on the border, when I’m talking to farmers and ranchers and sheriffs and law enforcement, they are fed up.
They are fed up with the crime, with the disease, with the poverty. It is overwhelming the State of Texas, and this administration is creating this lawlessness, and they’re doing it deliberately.
“It’s a maddening crisis,” Cruz said from the border in September. “Just over a week ago, there were fewer than a thousand people here under the bridge, averaging between 700 and 1000.
“Then, on September 8th, the Biden administration made a decision to cancel deportation flights back to Haiti. The vast majority of these illegal immigrants crossing into Del Rio are from Haiti,” which is thousands of miles and an ocean away, the Texas Republican continued.
“And [when the Biden administration] made that decision eight days ago, the 700 to a thousand people who were here discovered they could stay, they pulled out their cell phones,” Cruz continued.