Republican Sen. Tim Scott is hoping to earn the GOP nomination ahead of the 2024 election, and Sunday he stopped by Fox News to make his appeal to the public. Scott told host Griff Jenkins that among other things, he will focus on finishing the wall that Donald Trump wanted built along the border between the United States and Mexico.
Scott told Jenkins that right now, “We have a president who doesn’t solve the looming issues of the day, like our southern border, that has led to the deaths of 70,000 Americans because of fentanyl in the last 12 months.”
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“As president of the United States, I will fix our southern border by closing it and finishing the wall, us[ing] $5 billion to use the military-grade technology that’s available today on our borders.”
The Drug Enforcement Agency reports that as of 2023, China remains the largest supplier of fentanyl to the United States. Beijing and Hong Kong have taken steps to restrict the export of the drug, and it is true that organizations in Mexico have increased fentanyl production and shipment to the States in response. The drug is often smuggled into California and Arizona through corridors controlled by criminal organizations in Mexico, not through refugees and immigrants who attempt to enter the U.S. elsewhere, like the Texas border.
In August, Scott explained in a roundtable discussion in Yuma, Arizona that he would use technology “to surveil our border to stop the flow of fentanyl across our border” and would also “find a way to bring more border patrol agents to our border by eliminating the 87,000 IRS agents that were part of the Inflation Reduction Act.” It is unclear if these two plans are part of the $5 billion he says he would need.
In response to President Joe Biden’s recent explanation that Trump spent “four years gutting the immigration system,” which led to the current immigration catastrophe at the U.S.-Mexico border, Scott replied, “Washington is out of touch with the rest of the nation.”
“One of the reasons why we need to have change in the nation’s capital is because Washington is so consistently broken that the American people don’t trust the people in Washington,” he said.
