GOP Rep. After Deployment to Border: Situation Warrants Emergency Declaration

Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) said the situation at the southern border constituted a national emergency after witnessing it during his Air National Guard unit deployed to Arizona.

Partial transcript as follows:

MARGARET BRENNAN: "And we’re going to turn now to Illinois Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger who’s in Chicago but he is just freshly back from the border. He was serving with the Air National Guard at the border where he was flying surveillance missions out of Tucson, Arizona. Congressman this wasn’t your first border deployment. It’s the first one under the national emergency. Does it constitute a national emergency?"

REPRESENTATIVE ADAM KINZINGER: "Yeah I think it does. You know, I went down there kind of undecided. You know I- I put on my lieutenant colonel hat, was apolitical but obviously I’m looking at this, getting the information I can. And I think if this was just an issue of immigration it wouldn’t constitute a national emergency but what I saw was really disturbing. Let me give you just a couple of quick examples and I was just a small part of all the operations that were being done.

"We found at one point a woman hunkered down in the desert because her coyotes who brought her over deserted her because they wanted to get away. Had she actually not been found by us I don’t know if she’d been able to find her way home. So yeah, she got picked up by Border Patrol, she’s going to be deported, but that was a way better option than being one of the 200, at least, bodies they end up finding in the desert every year.

"And keep in mind I’ve done this, you know, we had a mission where we found 70 pounds of methamphetamines on somebody that was coming over and I’m just a very small part of that. This is the fourth time I’ve been to the border..."

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