During a town hall, Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. assailed President Joe Biden’s policies of mass releasing border crossers and illegal aliens into the United States, saying, “no nation can survive” without protecting its borders.
Kennedy detailed to NewsNation how he witnessed firsthand the Biden administration’s expansive Catch and Release network that sees border crossers and illegal aliens briefly detained before being released into American communities.
“The [Mexican drug] cartels are now running U.S. immigration policy, and everybody knows that,” Kennedy told NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas:
The cartels are now advertising all over the world that there’s an open border, and they’re bringing people in. They give them videos about exactly what to do; they fly to Mexico; they give them visas there … they go from Mexico City on a plane to Mexicali; they’re loaded on fleets of buses and then … they cross. [Emphasis added]
The only role of the border patrol is to stamp them in and check if they have a criminal record. If they don’t, they’re brought to the airport, and they’re given a ticket to any city in the United States that they want to go to. [Emphasis added]
Though the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) buries such totals, estimates suggest that the Biden administration has welcomed about five million border crossers and illegal aliens in the U.S. interior from January 2021 to April 2023 — a foreign population that exceeds the population of 28 states.
“I’m talking illegal immigration — everybody gets in. I watched it,” Kennedy said. “Seven million people have come in … no nation can survive if they can’t protect their borders.”
When Vargas claimed that border crossers and illegal aliens are only approved for entry to the U.S. if they “demonstrate need and apply for asylum,” Kennedy pushed back, noting that those released are given court dates years in the future for which they are unlikely to ever show up.
“The court date is a cursory court date; it’s like an arraignment. Their real court date, which they’re probably not going to show up to, is seven years later,” Kennedy said. “They’re essentially given a seven-year pass to stay in this country.”
Indeed, as Breitbart News most recently reported, the majority of border crossers and illegal aliens released into the U.S. interior are eventually found to have invalid asylum claims. In some immigration courts, their scheduled hearings are not for a decade.
Migrants waiting to be processed amid long waits at the USA border with Mexic on the last day of Title 42 in Yuma, Arizona, on May 11, 2023. (Katie McTiernan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Migrants wait in a long line at the USA border with Mexico, seeking asylum in the USA in the early morning hours of the last day of Title 42 in Yuma, Arizona, on May 11, 2023. (Katie McTiernan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Migrants wait to get on a transport bus after being processed at the USA border with Mexico on the last day of Title 42 in Yuma, Arizona, on May 11, 2023. (Katie McTiernan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Kennedy said an immigration deal in Congress is unlikely “until we seal the border because we’ve got, in the last three years, seven million people have come across the border illegally.”
When visiting the U.S.-Mexico border last month, Kennedy said he witnessed “the cruelty to these people that are being brought” at the hands of the cartels:
They’re being exploited; they’re being extorted; they’re being raped; they’re being robbed … there have been nine suicides of border patrolmen in the last year because they’re so demoralized about what’s happening. [Emphasis added]
Kennedy said he watched as hundreds of border crossers and illegal aliens traveled across the border in just one sector in one night. All of those who arrived, Kennedy said, “had been brutalized, and every penny had been taken away from them” by the cartels.
Sealing the border under Kennedy’s watch would include building more border walls, specifically in the most highly-trafficked areas along the border, more censors to quickly know the whereabouts of migrant groups, and a reversal of Biden’s policies where “the presumption is everybody gets in.”
“I witnessed it myself, and we can’t have that,” Kennedy said. “… this kind of immigration is unfair to everybody, particularly the immigrants that come here.”
Watch: Venezuelan Migrant Video Shows Camp Before and After Cartel Attack in Matamoros, Mexico
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
