A former Republican leader from California has a stern message for President Biden and his Democratic colleagues as suspected illegal immigrants continue to infiltrate neighborhoods around his upscale beach town, nearly 100 miles from the southern border.
Scott Baugh, a former California Assembly Minority Leader running to represent California’s 47th Congressional District, said in an interview with Fox News Digital that because of Biden and his policies, more Americans are now living as if they are on the edge of the border.
“Since Joe Biden was elected, 10 million illegal immigrants have come across the border and an open border is a very existential threat to our country,” Baugh said. “We need to stop this and reverse course and get this country back on the right path.”
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President Joe Biden with Republican congressional candidate and former California Assembly Minority Leader Scott Baugh. (Getty Images)
The district Baugh hopes to represent includes the upscale Southern California coastal town of Newport Beach, where earlier this month a group of about two dozen suspected illegal immigrants disembarked from a boat and fled unmolested into the community.
a Video of the incident goes viral The incident went viral on social media, but Baugh said such incidents “happen regularly in Orange County” and are, in fact, becoming more common along California’s south coast.
“You could say even Newport Beach is a border city because of the constant influx of immigrants, illegal immigrants, but that’s a direct result of my opponent’s policies of giving free health care and free welfare to illegal immigrants,” he said, referring to his Democratic opponent, state Sen. Dave Min.
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California State Sen. Dave Min, D-Calif., Monday, July 10, 2023, in Sacramento, California. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)
“All they have to do is land on our shores and they will be eligible for free health care, free education, free welfare. As long as the magnet that attracts people and welcomes illegal immigrants continues to exist, it is not surprising that they will continue to come. It is not surprising,” he said.
“We have to stop these policies, we have to remove the incentives for them to come into the country, and we just have to secure our borders and enforce them harder,” he added.
Baugh also lamented California’s lax crime policies. Proposition 47A state ballot initiative passed in 2014 that would ease penalties for certain crimes and prohibit local law enforcement from turning over illegal immigrants to federal immigration authorities.
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Scott Baugh, Republican candidate for California’s 47th Congressional District, is interviewed on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023, in Huntington Beach, California. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“These policies invite crime, and you can imagine what happens when you don’t crack down on crime: more people commit crimes because there are no penalties,” he said. “This is just the result of progressive policies that don’t want to hold people accountable for their illegal actions.”
If elected, Baugh vowed to first tackle the border crisis and the growing U.S. debt, which he said are contributing to the high levels of inflation seen under Biden.
He added that in what is expected to be a close election, undecided voters who are “fed up” with crime, inflation, illegal immigration and failing schools and want a brighter future will ultimately lean towards him.
Fox News Digital reached out to Min for comment, where he said, “I am willing to bring real solutions to the table and work bipartisanally to address the border crisis in Congress, but Scott Bough’s biggest supporters have gutted the most conservative immigration deal in a generation – a bipartisan deal supported by Border Patrol unions that would have funded state-of-the-art fentanyl detection at ports of entry and hired more than 1,500 new Border Patrol and Enforcement agents.”
President Biden spoke positively about mass immigration in a recent interview on a Spanish-language radio show. (Biden photo by Drew Ungerer/Getty Images; migrant caravan photo by Jose Torres/Anadolu via Getty Images)
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“Beau has yet to admit the truth. He would have undermined this border deal and hindered our nation’s national security interests just like the rest of his party who do nothing. And the voters here in California’s 47th Congressional District will see through his empty attacks in 2024 just as they will in 2022,” he added.
Baugh served in the state Assembly from 1995 to 2000 and was House Minority Leader from 1999 to 2000. In the 2022 election, he ran to unseat Rep. Katie Porter, a Democrat who currently represents the 47th Congressional District, but was narrowly defeated.
Election analysts are rating the race in California’s 47th Congressional District as either “Dem. Strong,” “Slightly Democratic,” or “50-50.”
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