Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) has been one of the few national Democrats to call out the Biden administration's disastrous handling of the ongoing crisis at the U.S.-Mexico.
Cuellar told CNN on Thursday that Vice President Kamala Harris's trip to Central America in June was pointless because nothing was solved to stop the continued large numbers of people illegally crossing into the U.S., with the most recent surge occurring in Del Rio, Texas.
"In the wake of Vice President Harris's trip to Latin America, what do you think the impact has been? Has anything changed?" CNN's Erica Hill asked.
"With all due respect, no. Look, you know, we've been providing assistance to Central America since 2014. I was involved with...then at that time Vice President Joe Biden to provide the first $750 million to the Central American countries. I think since then it's been over $3.5 million — billion that we have appropriated," Cuellar said.
"Look, we're focusing right now on what's happening in the Del Rio sector, but down in the lower Rio Grande Valley, we still got people from Central America coming. If you look at the sector of Del Rio, they've had over 200,000 encounters," he continued. "When you look at the lower Rio Grande Valley, you've had over half a million encounters. So those numbers are huge numbers. And again — you know, keep in mind that we're only looking at what's happened here at the U.S. border, but I gave you some numbers of what — the numbers of Haitians and other folks from Panama, Colombia, Mexico, and this is going to go on for a while."
Harris was tasked with addressing the "root causes" of the surge in illegal immigration by working with Central American countries, though even Guatemala's president, Alejandro Giammattei, said the Biden administration's open-borders approach to immigration has been a contributing factor to people deciding to take the dangerous journey to America's southern border.