Henry Cuellar

On Monday’s edition of NBC’s “Meet the Press NOW,” Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) said that “Not a single Democrat nationwide would talk about border security” in 2024, but now Democrats are talking about the issue. He also said that “when you start taking very extreme positions and you act like those are midstream positions that are important to folks, they’re going to reject that.” And “Democrats down here in South Texas, the sheriffs, the county commissioners, and all that, we didn’t believe in open borders, we didn’t believe in sanctuary cities.”

Cuellar said, “I tried to tell the Biden administration, look, I’m a Democrat, but the way the Biden administration was doing this, it was wrong.”

He added, “In April of 2024, they finally put in the right policies, and the numbers started going down slowly, and I said, guess what’s going to happen? When President Trump — if he wins, he’s going to take credit. And the numbers have gone down 96% down of crossings, without a single foot of border wall, without a single buoy being put in the water. So, yes, President Trump, with all due respect, yes, he did close the border. But it started going down in April of 2024. But it was already too late for Biden — for the Biden administration. I wish they would have listened to people like myself. Now we hear some of his former officials…and they thought that maybe that their approach was not right. They could not say two words. And I tried to get them to say two words: Border security.”

Cuellar concluded, “Not a single Democrat nationwide would talk about border security. They would say, quote, oh, it’s a broken immigration system, and we’ve got to fix that. No. It had to do about border security. Now, I’m glad that Democrats are using the two words that I’ve been asking them to use, border security.”

While discussing Hispanic voters, Cuellar said that Democrats get Hispanic votes in South Texas, and, on the national level, “Democrats have caused their own problem. And I’ll be very straightforward, when you start taking very extreme positions and you act like those are midstream positions that are important to folks, they’re going to reject that. So, at the national level, we have to do a better job. But I can say, Democrats down here in South Texas, the sheriffs, the county commissioners, and all that, we didn’t believe in open borders, we didn’t believe in sanctuary cities. We were law and order Democrats. And Democrats need to understand — and I’ll ask our leaders that, when we take charge of the House, we’ve got to make sure that the extreme positions are not put as mainstream positions for Democrats.”

Earlier, Cuellar said that ICE has overreached under the Trump administration.