Billionaire investor Mark Cuban said Thursday on CNN that the border crisis “got away” from both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris because their hearts were “too big” to anticipate how many people would want to cross.
Over the last three years, Republican lawmakers have called out the record setting border crossing under the Biden-Harris administration, with U.S. Border Patrol total encounters hitting over 1.6 million crossing in the fiscal year of 2021 compared to 405,036 the year prior. Cuban stated on “Erin Burnett OutFront” that despite the issue slipping from the administration initially, Biden “learned” from the mistake and implemented an executive order three years later.
“So when it comes to criminalizing and not criminalizing crossing the border, I mean that is just so stark, but you view that as an evolution?” Burnett asked.
“Look here’s my opinion, I’m not speaking for the campaign with this. I thought their hearts were too big when Joe came into office that they didn‘t know how many people would cross the border and it got away from them. But they figured it out, they learned,” Cuban said. “What did they do? He put together an executive order and now the number of border crossings is down to where they were in the Trump [administration], maybe a little lower. She [Harris] says she‘s going to sign the border bill, which is very clear where she stands now.”
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Cuban went on to claim that while both Harris and former President Donald Trump have stated they want to deport illegal immigrants, he claimed Trump hasn’t “thought” his plan “through.”
“I don’t think he’s thought this through, whereas Vice President Harris, she understands that this has to be a consistent program that everybody understands that is put forward, that everybody can feel safe with, but that you have to follow law. You have to go through the front door,” Cuban said. “You have to follow the legal processes, but she’s not going to send the militia to pull people out of their homes like Donald Trump might.”
After facing repeated backlash over his administration’s handling of the southern border, Biden implemented a immigration executive order in June that pauses new asylum requests once the number of migrant crossings exceeds a daily average of 2,500 over a week. While the order has significantly reduced border crossings, the Biden-Harris administration still averaged two million illegal crossings per year from 2021 to 2023, according to the Washington Post.
During an interview with Oprah Winfrey on September 19, Harris stated that she takes the border crisis “seriously” and would “make sure” that the bipartisan border bill, rejected by the Senate on Feb. 7, reaches her “desk” for her signature. Harris later traveled to the southern border in Arizona, but was later called out by the Border Patrol Union on X, which asked where she had been for the past three and a half years after she “ignored the border problem she created.”
Featured Image Credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America
