Ken Cuccinelli served as Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security in the Trump administration. He was Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services before that. Ken is a Senior Fellow for Homeland Security and Immigration at the Center for Renewing America.
00:02:53.360I don't know what it is today, but it's got to be – if anything, it's got to be higher.
00:02:59.020And, of course, that puts it at another million or so gotaways, so – or two.
00:03:08.120And we've already got the equivalent of more than the state of Utah having come into this country that we have – that we know about under the Biden administration with no signs that it's letting up.
00:03:21.300And, by the way, even Democrat voters don't support this.
00:03:25.060This isn't a Democrat-Republican thing.
00:03:27.760This is just a radical portion of the Democrat Party that has the wheel in this administration and the AOC, Ali Mayorkas types who truly believe in open borders because they believe in undermining America, not in preserving and protecting it.
00:03:46.040You know, I don't mean to offend anybody, but I don't believe those folks are smart enough to have come up with this.
00:03:52.460I think that there are a group – and I've said it throughout – there are a group of Marxist Dems driving the Democratic Party and this puppet president of ours.
00:04:03.180And only one name comes to mind when I think of anyone with the sophistication and the motivation to carry out these Marxist policies, and that's one Barack Obama.
00:04:14.260He has to be integrally, in my opinion, integrally involved in some fashion, don't you think?
00:04:23.640Well, certainly Mayorkas was the deputy secretary.
00:04:31.180He was first the head of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the legal immigration agency, and then was the deputy secretary, which is the same two positions I had in the Trump administration.
00:04:42.600But he was there in the Obama administration.
00:04:44.940So they recycle him in and make him secretary, and lo and behold, he's implementing far more radical – I mean, we thought Obama was radical – far more radical policies under Joe Biden than was the case under Barack Obama, and to the point where people are legitimately talking about impeaching Mayorkas.
00:05:06.100Yeah, they're talking about impeaching Mayorkas, but again, I guess we go to the point.
00:05:12.640Do we really think that in that role he has the power to do that without a cabal, without a directorate guiding him in every way?
00:05:22.340This is a president, an administration.
00:05:25.160They are operating as if this were an out-and-out totalitarian state, and they with all of the power.
00:05:31.860And by the way, they seem to have all of the power.
00:05:35.420Why are we dancing around this in this country right now?
00:06:14.780I mean, we can go around the horn in South Carolina.
00:06:17.280It's been a busy time, and it was a busy time.
00:06:21.920I was an attorney general for Virginia when Barack Obama was president, and you remember, I've got a pen and a phone.
00:06:29.060Well, and he was serious, but that creates opportunities for Republican state attorneys general to knock the federal government back within the boundaries of the law.
00:06:39.640And that is happening some, but it's a very different situation in that getting a court to order an administration to obey and enforce the law, okay, you can get that, like the Remain in Mexico program, which was so effective.
00:07:55.000But tearing down is a lot easier than building.
00:07:57.960And that's what this administration is doing.
00:08:00.060They're tearing down every form of protection at our border and of the American people and of this nation and of our sovereignty that they possibly can.
00:08:16.600You know, we've got the political theater of thousands of migrants being shipped, whether it be from Florida to Martha's Vineyard, whether it be from Texas up to D.C. or New York.
00:08:30.520But the theater isn't changing the circumstance or the trajectory of what's happening in this country.
00:08:37.560We've got Mark Morgan, formerly the head of Customs and Border Protection, estimated there were 5 to 6 million people in this country in President Biden's first not even two years in office.
00:08:58.760We're getting numbers like 604,000 getaways.
00:09:01.480We know that's all pure bunkum because no one is keeping track because they're not close enough to the border to know what the hell is going on.
00:09:10.760Yeah, they're too occupied providing human services instead of national security.
00:11:14.180And, I mean, the Republicans are talking tough now like they always do in the minority.
00:11:20.400It's easy to talk tough in the minority.
00:11:22.940What are you going to do when you actually get the majority?
00:11:25.560And it looks like, if I had to bet, I would bet that they're going to have a fairly strong majority in the House and a thin but Republican majority in the Senate.
00:11:37.060So on the budget front, they have power.
00:11:40.980They can put budget riders that stop all of the crazy regulatory efforts of the Biden administration in their tracks.
00:11:49.440They just specifically say this money can't be used to do X, and it stops it in its tracks.
00:11:55.100But they've never done it in the past, ever.
00:11:58.980So we'll see if they use that power to do it now.
00:12:02.960Donald Trump, President Trump tried to put up a wall, was fought at every step of the way by the establishment Republican Party.
00:12:10.160And they were just as effective as the left in stopping border security and now responsible for what we're witnessing.
00:12:51.600No Republican will become the nominee for president in the foreseeable future without a tough on illegal immigration
00:12:59.500and a fairly strong position on legal immigration that's protective of American workers, something you've talked a lot about, and so have I.
00:13:08.220But I think it might just be you and me in a phone booth on that one.
00:13:11.680But they're not – it's not going to happen.
00:14:44.880Are you really hopeful that that will occur?
00:14:46.860No, I'm not really hopeful that Mitch McConnell will have a metamorphosis, but that, you know, once you get, say, 30 Republicans who've had a metamorphosis in that caucus, he wants to stay the leader.
00:15:01.560And, I mean, I've seen this in my home state as well at the state level, and he will adjust to stay the leader.
00:15:09.600And if that's what he has to do to adjust, he'll do it.
00:15:12.500The question is, are we electing enough people who are going to push him in that direction?
00:15:16.800Yeah, my feeling is, if you've got that many people elected, why the hell put up with Mitch McConnell?
00:15:25.880Why not put in a new leader who understands what America first means and what making America great requires?
00:15:32.960Well, that would be nice, and, you know, in my prior role leading the Senate Conservatives Fund, which is the leading conservative pack on the Senate that actually takes on the leadership, I did that for five years.
00:15:49.960And, you know, we elected people like Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and others up through the years, and if you look at the caucus, they're the best 10 or 12 you've got, but we need to double that number before you're really going to move the needle.
00:16:11.800I don't – the process of someone becoming a leadership involves them selling their soul too completely for me to hope that we're going to get a leader that's going to be, as you described.
00:16:25.620It's more that we're going to get somebody who's transactional enough that they want to remain the leader, and so they're willing to simply do what the majority of their caucus is pressing them to do on the immigration front.
00:16:38.100That's the only way I see this happening.
00:16:40.980You're being pragmatic, and I understand that, and I think that's smart.
00:16:45.500But what I have trouble understanding is how the Republican Party can even look voters in the face come this November without any kind of statement from leadership, from the party, in any form, talking about what is happening in real time, in real politic, and namely, that that border is wide open.
00:17:10.120That we are permitting the poisoning of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the killing, the murder by the drug cartels in cooperation and conjunction with the communist Chinese who are manufacturing the product.
00:17:25.340In fact, they send their chemists here to do so, and transport by the millions of pills, fentanyl, to kill Americans.
00:17:34.500We have our State Department has up travel alerts now in Mexico for Americans not to go because of the violence and the cartel violence.
00:17:45.880But we have no foreign policy toward Mexico and show absolutely no inclination to take on the cartels, except Greg Abbott the other day said that they were going to identify them as far as organizations.
00:19:11.800We don't control our own immigration program.
00:19:14.420Our own government is flying illegal immigrants across the country in the dark of night to settle them in towns and villages and cities in which the governments don't even know they've arrived.
00:19:28.700I mean, this is the balkanization of America.
00:19:37.720It's policy by the Stalinist left of the Democrat Party.
00:19:41.440And I will say, you and I were joking about joking before we got on the air.
00:19:45.880And I will say it is mildly amusing to see people who were shuffling illegals around under the dark of night a year ago screaming bloody murder when Greg Abbott, Doug Ducey, and Ron DeSantis do it in the plain light of day and do a few dozen of them,
00:20:04.300but to their select, posh, elitist locales that are just for virtue signaling, not for actually helping, i.e., Martha's Vineyard, that there is at least some humor within the misery.
00:20:20.840Well, we have to look for it, but it's there.
00:20:26.000And mostly in heaping portions of just outright absurdity and tragedy.
00:20:31.860Ken Cotinale, always great to have you with us here.
00:20:34.780Thanks for joining us here on The Great America Show.