Speaking Monday in a Texas border town, DeSantis pledged to finish building the southern border wall, put an end to birthright citizenship, and even dispatch U.S. troops into Mexico to combat drug cartels as part of an aggressive immigration and border security policy that largely mirrors Donald Trump's.
The Florida governor hopeful also chided both major political parties for failing to stop what he described as an immigrant "invasion."
"I have listened to people in D.C. for years and years and years, going back decades – Republicans and Democrats – always chirping about this yet never actually bringing the issue to a conclusion," DeSantis told an audience of roughly 100 people. "What we're saying is no excuses on this."
DeSantis unveiled his plan in Eagle Pass, Texas, which has emerged as a major corridor for illegal border crossings during Joe Biden's presidency.
Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), points out that a recent AP-NORC poll found that 6 in 10 adults in the U.S. disapprove of Biden's handling of immigration.
"… We've had 2-1/2 years now of the Biden administration's policies. They have signaled what their policy is and it's up to other candidates to weigh in and tell the American public how they would handle it differently," he tells AFN. "We're seeing even in the Democratic presidential nominating process that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is carving out a different position from the president – so there's certainly great discontent."
As for DeSantis' proposal, Mehlman sees it as a "serious [and] rational" proposal designed to counter Biden's "invitation" to illegal immigrants.
"These are ideas that have been around for a long time," he states, "and they all focus on deterring people from coming across the border illegally in the first place.
"That has always been the most effective and most humane way of dealing with illegal immigration: convince people that there really is no benefit to violating the law in the first place."
