Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy called for taking “next level” efforts to secure the United States’s southern border.
While speaking with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Ramaswamy suggested an active military presence be used to limit criminals and fentanyl from entering the U.S.
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“We need to take this to the next level,” Ramaswamy said. “Building the wall is not sufficient. This is killing Americans on American soil. That is justification for using the U.S. military to actually secure our southern border.”
“If we can use our military to secure somebody else’s border somewhere else, we can certainly use our own military to secure our own southern border,” Ramaswamy added. “We need leadership to actually deliver on that. This is not that hard.”
Ramaswamy suggested the Biden administration is using similar rhetoric that Democrats used in 1863, nodding to “short-term economic justifications to justify illegal and immoral behavior.”
“‘The vegetables will rot in the field. We need people to pluck our crops,’” Ramaswamy suggested as examples of Democrats’ immigration rhetoric. “This is the thing that Democrats were saying in the South in the 1860s to justify a different form of immoral and illegal behavior in the form of slavery. Now, they’re using that justification for illegal immigrants to be able to turn the other way and abandon the rule of law.”
The Republican candidate said he believes the border crisis is a “unifying American issue,” one that points to a greater need to “stand for the rule of law in this country.”
“Whether it’s the Durham Report, whether it’s Neely, whether it’s the crossings on the southern border, the deeper cancer is that we’ve abandoned the rule of law,” Ramaswamy said.
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“And if I’m elected president,” he continued, “we are going to restore it once and for all this country.”
On Wednesday, Ramaswamy said that the termination of Title 42, which expired last week, now paves the way for “14k illegal immigrants [to] cross our Swiss cheese southern border daily.”