Texas State Rep. Harrison to Newsmax: Urgency Rising on Immigration State Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Texas (Newsmax)
By Fran Beyer | Monday, 21 November 2022 09:46 AM EST
Texas Republican state lawmakers have to be laser-focused on border security, an issue of increasing importance as the end of Title 42 looms, GOP Texas state Rep. Brian Harrison said Monday on Newsmax.
In an interview on Newsmax's "Wake Up America," the former chief of staff at the Department of Health and Human Services said "we've got to not voluntarily give… any power back to Democrats that they didn't earn from the voters."
Harrison said the political pushback is particularly important as the Biden administration seeks an end to the public health order that expels migrants to Mexico.
Title 42 "was the regulation that allows for immediate deportations" and secured the southern border ever since its imposition early in the coronavirus pandemic, Harrison noted.
"I was a member of the Trump administration, the chief of staff at HHS. We were the agency that issued the now famous Title 42 order, which is about to go away," Harrison said. "All [President] Joe Biden had to do was nothing when he took office."
But Biden instead "went out of his way" and took "every action possible to make the border as unsecure as possible," Harrison said.
According to Harrison, the state of Texas has already had to take $3 billion to $4 billion for border security efforts "on our own."
"We have to do more with the court striking down Title 42," he said, referring to a federal judge's Nov. 16 decision giving the Biden administration until Dec. 21 to wind down its use of Title 42 to expel migrants.
"We need a Texas style Title 42 law that allows for us to immediately be able to begin — or I should say resume — deportations immediately on the southern border," Harrison said. "Because if we don't do this, the Biden administration [by] their own numbers… are saying [there are] 18,000 illegal border crossings a day."
Harrison added that Texas was once an "entirely Democrat state."
"But that was an entirely different, completely different Democratic Party than the party of today, the party of Joe Biden, the party of socialism and open borders and inflation and stripping parents of their rights," he said.
"This is not a party that is to be negotiated with right now," he added, vowing to force a vote to change some state rules "and hopefully, we'll be successful here in January."