Sen. Joni Ernst: Biden must own border crisis as emerging national security threat to US

It’s a tragedy that seems to play on an endless loop. Unaccompanied children, and families, making perilous journeys at the hands of ruthless smugglers to enter the U.S. through our southern border – facing horrendous conditions, rape, dehydration, and other dangers. U.S. border patrol left overwhelmed, leaving it difficult to curb the tide of illegal narcotics and human trafficking, while keeping criminals and terrorists off America’s streets. 

Unfortunately, President Biden’s recent actions perpetuate this tragic playlist –signing a series of high-profile orders that strike a distinctly different tune when it comes to the security of our borders. 

Stop the border wall, Biden says, while upending our immigration enforcement efforts in the U.S., all while peddling a new immigration bill that will create more problems than it solves. 

Under the Biden White House, daily detentions of unaccompanied minors have gone from around 45 to over 300. In the past two weeks alone, the number of children detained at the border tripled to over 3,250. 

According to a former Department of Homeland Security official, that’s the highest in the agency’s history. And as we enter spring, these numbers will only grow. 

This is Biden’s border crisis. 

As the Republican lead on the Emerging Threats Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, I view this crisis not just as a humanitarian one but a growing threat to our national security. 

From a national security perspective, our unchecked border jeopardizes regional stability and impedes much-needed economic reforms in Central America while challenging the security of the entire Western Hemisphere.  

Many of the Transnational Crime Organizations operating in the region have a direct impact at home, including my state Iowa, making the security of our border and our nation inextricably linked.  All while China exerts its influence all over Latin America, from Chinese-developed vaccine distribution to alarming levels of trade and investment.

Communist China knows it is in our own neighborhood and has capitalized on the fact that our border policy has not always sung the same melody from one White House to the next. 

One of the lessons we learned from 9/11 was how patient sleeper cells can be when it comes to plotting their next attack. DHS has said the number of terror-watchlisted individuals encountered at our southern border has increased over the last two years.

Overall, DHS stops on average 10 individuals on the terrorist watchlist per day. Recently, DHS detained eleven Iranians attempting to illegally enter our country. This is on top of the fourteen Iranians who have been arrested by the agency this fiscal year, which is the sum total detained in all of 2020. 

There’s a crisis at our border whether President Biden says it or not.  It’s time for him to hit pause on the partisan grandstanding toward the liberal donor class and work together to solve this crisis.

Click here to read the op-ed as published by Fox News.