DeSantis lays out his border plan, including funding the wall with remittance quotas

Appearing on Fox News this Saturday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis laid out his vision for how to handle the ongoing border crisis.

Featured specifically on Fox News”Life, liberty and Levin,” offered a wide range of solutions, including even a border wall financed by remittance fees.

The exchange began with host Mark Levin asking the governor to lay out his border plan.

“Well, we banned sanctuary cities,” DeSantis replied. “We have no-benefit programs, like E-Verify. We have a human trafficking task force and we've increased penalties for human trafficking. I've sent troops and law enforcement personnel to Texas to help at the border”.

“And then we have a program to transport illegal aliens to sanctuary jurisdictions, and we did that in places like Martha's Vineyard. We're also a maritime state, so we've interdicted ships. We've helped the Coast Guard in places like Haiti and deported people back to Haiti. So we leaned a lot,” he added.

“Every community is now a border community with fentanyl and everything else. Here's the thing. As president, this will be a day one issue for me. We are going to declare a national emergency. I will mobilize all resources, including the military. We will put it on the southern border. We will stop the invasion,” he continued.

Turning specifically to policies, he called for the reinstatement of the stay-in-Mexico policy that was created by the Trump administration but later revoked by the Biden administration.

Trump vows to 'end all open border policies' on day one, mass deportation of illegals https://t.co/dR2qNyubVn road @BIZPACRevision

— Based on BPR (@DumpstrFireNews) January 4, 2024

He also discussed funding for a border wall.

“We will build a border wall and finance it by charging taxes on remittances that workers send to foreign countries,” he said. “This will raise billions of dollars.”

Many legal and illegal aliens working in the United States send money to their families in foreign countries. This act of moving money from the US to a family in Mexico, for example, is called a remittance, and what DeSantis was proposing was to tax those remittances.

DeSantis continued to lay out his vision by resorting to deportations.

“We have to deport people who are here illegally, and we haven't seen that in many administrations at nearly adequate levels,” he said. “So we will. And then once people know the law is going to be enforced, they're much less likely to try to come illegally.”

“And finally, I will treat the Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. They are invading this country and putting this fentanyl poison into all of our communities and killing tens of thousands of people every year,” he concluded.

Consider that former President Donald Trump, the front-runner in the 2024 GOP presidential primary, promised many of the same things before winning the 2016 presidential election. And at first, he seemed to mean it.

For example, in March 2017, Rep. Mike Rogers introduced a bill, the Border Wall Funding Act of 2017, that would have imposed a two percent tax on all remittances to Latin America. However, for some reason, the bill never became law.

Trump could have taxed the remittances and used the money to build the wall.

He chickened out.

— Martin Knight (@_MartinKnight) January 10, 2024

DeSantis, meanwhile, has pledged to do what Trump could not.

“When he says he couldn't do the job, look, he wanted to send the message: I'll do the job. I'm not going to make excuses,” he said during an October interview with NewsNation.

Listen:

To be fair, Trump faced a lot of legal challenges due to leftists filing lawsuits against all of his moves, especially all of his border-related moves.

In DeSantis' case, he does have an advantage: He convened a statewide grand jury that decided in November that a “modest” fee should be imposed on all remittances.

“The grand jury says this fee, which would likely require approval by a supermajority vote in the Legislature, could generate tens of millions that could pay to strengthen enforcement, education or money to help agencies states to deal with unaccompanied migrant children.” Politician reported in November.

Senior Staff Writer
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V. Saxena is a writer for BizPac Review with a decade of experience as a professional writer and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University.

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