Texas: The Issue Is – Senator Ted Cruz talks debt ceiling, border crisis

HOUSTON - As the national debt continues to grow, reaching the highest debt seen in history, conversations in Congress continue to circle around what should be done regarding the U.S. debt ceiling.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz sits down to discuss how national spending is affecting inflation across the country and in Texas. The Senator also talks about the crisis at the Texas border.

ECONOMY: White House says GOP plans would add $3 trillion to national debt

Greg Groogan: $31 trillion and growing, 100 percent of GDP with another showdown coming. There will be colossal pressure for Republicans to hold their nose and raise the debt ceiling again. How do you stand?

Senator Ted Cruz: What we are seeing right now is the highest debt in history. It is crushing. We are bankrupting this country. The Democrats over the last two years with the Biden Presidency and a Democrat House and Senate rammed through trillions in new spending which is what is fueling the inflation, which is hammering Texans across our state. The cost of everything has gone up from food to electricity to health care to gasoline everything. I'm urging my colleagues in the Senate and colleagues in the House to hold the line and extract real and meaningful reforms to help fix the problem because what we are doing right now is wildly irresponsible and it's hurting Texans and Americans across our country.

Greg Groogan: Senator, you have witnessed first-hand the multi-layered crisis on our Texas border with two and a half million uninvited immigrants allowed to walk in last year, with really no way to get that genie back in the bottle. With the next election nearly two years down the road, Texans want to know if there is anything that can be done by a split Congress to slow the flow and limit the damage?

SUGGESTED: Senator John Cornyn talks border, debt ceiling, Ukraine and China

Senator Cruz: What has been happening at our Southern border is horrific. I spend a lot of time in the Rio Grande Valley. I spend a lot of time on our Southern border. It has never been remotely this bad. In the two years Joe Biden has been President we have seen over 5.5 million illegal aliens cross into this country. It's the highest level of illegal immigration in the history of our nation. It's never been remotely this bad and when you go down there and I have repeatedly brought groups of Senators down to the border to see first-hand and go out on midnight patrol with the border patrol agents, you see little children who've been horrifically abused by the cartel, physically abused, sexually abused. You see women who have been violently raped by the cartels. You sit down with Texas farmers and ranchers who show you photograph after photograph of dead bodies they've found on their farms and ranches, dead bodies of children, abandoned dead bodies of pregnant women, dead bodies of elderly people that the coyotes have abandoned in the Texas heat. It is horrific and on top of all of that, we have a deluge of illegal drugs coming across. Last year we had over a hundred thousand people die of overdoses in this country mostly from Chinese Fentanyl that is flooding across the border and it is horrific. I got to tell you, Greg, nobody who looks at this firsthand can defend these open border policies as compassionate or humane. It is cruel. It is indefensible. It is wrong and what's so maddening is all of this is the result of deliberate political decisions by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the Democrats in office. They've made a political decision that it benefits the Democrat party to have open borders and so they are unwilling to change. We obviously have a divided government in Washington, my view is Republicans need to do everything we can to exercise leverage to try and force this administration to follow the law, to secure the border. It is cruel and it is inflicting enormous harm on South Texas, on the entire state of Texas, and on the country.