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The Truth with Lisa Boothe: Senator Katie Britt Exposes the Reality of the Border Crisis

Published Oct 9, 2023, 8:00 AM

In this episode, Lisa welcomes Senator Katie Britt of Alabama to discuss the border crisis. Senator Britt shares her firsthand experiences at the border, criticizing President Biden's lack of action and emphasizing the humanitarian cost and dangers posed by human traffickers, drug cartels, and terrorists. They also discuss the influence of drug cartels across the country and the failed policies of the Biden administration. Senator Britt then discusses a piece of legislation she has put together to address children's usage of social media, emphasizing the importance of parental consent and protecting children from harmful content and cyberbullying. The Truth with Lisa Boothe is part of the iHeartRadio Podcast Network - nw episodes debut every Monday & Thursday.

We want to share a good friend's podcast with you this week, Enjoy the Truth with Lisa Booth in the Clay and Bock podcast Network.

Before we get started today, you have to listen to this clip.

If you're not telling it, that's on you. Because when a woman sits there and she tells you not just about being raped, but how many times a day she's raped. When she tells you about having to lay in that bed while they come.

In and out and in.

And out, it's disgusting and it's despicable. Folks. You look at the number of people that have died at the border because Joe Biden has made it more and more enticing to come here. Make no mistake, this is a result of failed policies. We could fix this. We can't throw money at this and fix it. We have to actually change the policies. I looked in the eyes of CBP agents who said, we're exhausted. We're not only having to be paper pushers. We're also trying to do what we did, what we took an oath of office to do, and that is protect this border.

But when they tell.

You about finding small children who have drowned in that river or pulling a lifeless body of a woman who was pregnant with twins. It changes the way you think about what's happening.

Guys, that's not.

The American dream, that's an American nightmare.

That was Senator Katie Britt of Alabama speaking at a press conference recently, pleading with reporters, begging them to cover the atrocities that are happening at the Southern border. I don't think I have heard anyone articulate the issue better than her. You can tell she's a mom. You can tell that's where she's coming from. We're going to have her on the show today to talk about the border, talk about what she's seen, what you need to know. Also, she has recently introduced legislation to protect kids on social media. We'll get her take on that. And I have a little bit of a football rivalry with her. She went to the University of Alabama. I went to the University of Tennessee. So we'll talk about that as well. Stay tuned for Senator Katie Brett. So, Senator Brett, it's such an honor to have you on the show. Before we get into the important stuff. My only bone to pick with you, as you went to the University of Alabama. I went to the University of Tennessee. So hopefully we can move fast.

And Lisa, you know, I'm glad we're clearing the air on this early, honestly because I'm glad, and I'm also glad it's not the third week of October when we would really have to step up the rivalry. I am hoping you'll got the best of us last year, both on the basketball court and on the football field, So I'm hoping we can turn the tide literally and figuratively this year.

I made the mistake of buying SEC Championship tickets after the game, and that did not work out for me.

So well, you know in.

Our house too, been played football for the University of Alabama and actually broke his leg. Alabama Tennessee our senior year, and so our junior year and his and so anyway, it is, it's always a big, a big rivalry in our house, for sure.

Absolutely well, I want to shift gears into what's really important. I heard you speak at a press conference recently. I played the clip for the audience in the introduction. I don't think I've ever heard someone articulate better about the border, what's going on, Why it's important than what you did. You know, take us through what you have seen at the border and what people at home need to know.

Lisa. It is.

It's truly gut wrenching, and I feel like we are not telling this story. And so it's one thing to read about it, but it is another to see it and to hear firsthand what people are encountering.

And you know, it was one thing I was so.

Grateful Senator Blackburn took me upon me entering the Senate and she said, you've got to see this firsthand. And I just want to contrast that with Joe Biden. So I have gone to the border three times my first two months in office, whereas Joe Biden has been in office now you know, two years and nine months, and he spent less than three hours at the border, and the very limited time he spent it was for a sanitized photo op.

You look at that.

You even see that last week he was one hundred and seventeen miles away from the Arizona border, so a quick flight over or drive, you know, under our circumstances, and.

Yet he still refused to go and see it. And when you.

See it, you really start to understand the humanitarian cost of this crisis that's occurring right here on our soil. And I have said after being there, there is no doubt that it is open season for human traffickers, for drug cartels, and for terrorists and the victims.

I mean these drug cartells, Lisa.

They are utilizing TikTok and other means of social media to entice these people to come here. And Biden's border policies, these open border policies, are encouraging people to put themselves in harms way. I mean, I saw a woman walk down the river bank with tiny children following her as she began to wade in the river, knowing that any of those kids could could be ripped away by the tide. And in fact, it does happen, because when you talk with border patrol agents, they tell you those stories, Lisa. They tell you about lifeless children, They tell you about bodies of men and women, and the tears that came out of a border patrol agent's eyes as he told me about pulling the lifeless body of a woman who was pregnant with twins. And you also, you know, ask them and they will talk to you. So these men and women that come across. You know, I was sitting there with a woman who had a six month old baby and they're shivering, wet, and the husband tells you, hey, this is how much I paid to get here. And they pay multiple times, Lisa. They pay the drug cartels to bring them. Then they have to pay to a cost to tag, you know, to cross a different area, and Lisa, if they can't pay by financial means, then they have to pay with others. And so that's when you know, you I talked to a woman and she told me it wasn't just that she was raped in this journey, it was how many times a day she was raped. And you think about the disgust and the indignity as she told me about laying on the bed and having to wait for gentlemen, for men not gentlemen, men to come in and out of that room, and in and out.

Of that room, and it just is despicable.

You know. I also want to make sure people understand the drug cartels, Lisa, have their tentacles in every single corner of this country, because, as I mentioned, that man who I was talking to and told me how much he paid, every single one of those men will tell you this is how much I owed, this is where I'm going, this is what my job is going to be, where I'm going, and this.

Is how much more I owe.

And what happens is they go to these locations, the drug cartels them come around to continue to collect. If they don't pay up, they know where their family is in whichever country. I mean, this is unfortunately a well oiled machine that has been fueled by the failed policies of the Biden administration.

And they've allowed it, you know.

And so I wanted to ask you, well, and you can tell when you're when you're talking about this that you're a mom and it's coming from a place of you know, caring and a place of you know, truly being horrified by what you've seen. Obviously, the Biden Administration's allowed this to happen. And now you've got the Department of Homeland Security Secretary majorcas Is going to allow border wall construction in South Texas to resume it under the or the Biden ministry.

Why now, I mean.

They've allowed this to reach this point, So why now? And what do you make of that?

Lisa? Great question, and it is you mentioned Mayorcus so let's rewind back.

You go back to President Obama and his Secretary of Homeland Security, Jay Johnson. Well, he said, if we have one thousand encounters a day, one thousand, then that.

Would be a crisis.

We now have ten thousand on average this last week, I mean some days eleven thousand migrants coming across our border. Now, Secretary Mayorcis happened to be the deputy at the time in which Secretary j Johnson said that one thousand was a crisis. But yet when I had him in front of us with our Homeland Security Subcommittee, I'm the ranking member of that on appropriations, he refused. Lisa refused to call it a crisis. I think we are seeing that they understand that something has to be done. Unfortunately, though, we saw President Biden tried to shield himself from them, beginning to put up these barriers, these physical barriers, putting up remaining parts of the wall, saying that Congress quote made him do.

That, and walls don't work.

What I have to stay back to Joe Biden on that is he knows wal's work because he built one around his house, his beach house in Delaware. He knows that because he has one around his house in DC. He knows that Wall's work. And what I want him to understand is the people, everyday, people of this country, Americans, deserve the same safety and security that he does. And to your earlier point about being a mom, I mean, that's another thing that this administration continues to turn a blind eye to, continues to they continue to try to distance themselves from what's happening with fentanyl poisoning across this nation. We know that fentanyl is a leading cause of death between the ages of eighteen and forty five. We know that over three hundred people a day are dying of fentanyl poisoning. And yet this administration, we know where it's coming from, has refused to actually secure our border. And all of the funding that they're asking for, Lisa, particularly in the supplemental that they just ask us, a complete and total joke. It is actually just to fuel this crisis more and more, and it is not to actually stop it. And I believe we have to stand up and say enough is enough. We must secure our border and put the people of this nation first.

Totally agree with you on that, Amen, And I don't want to ask you on the mom front I know you've recently introduced a legislation regarding social media. Tell us a little bit about what you introduced, why you introduced it, and why it's important to you.

Yeah, so this is I think that this is one of the most critical issues facing our country right now, is our youth and what is happening, the mental health crisis that's occurring, and what can we do to put up some guardrails to help young people'll be able to navigate this. And so what we did is came together with Brian Schottz and Chris Murphy and Tom Cotton and myself. So we did not come to the table as Democrats or Republicans. We came to the table as four concerned parents. We put together a very simple piece of legislation. It is only eight pages, and Lisa, you know that nothing in DC is only eight pages. But it just says you cannot be on social media before you're thirteen. That's what the social media companies say they do anyway, so this should not be a problem.

It then says step two that you have to.

Have parental consent to be on that social media platform between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. And I think Senator Cotton said this best. He said, parents want the same rights they have in the real world, meaning if your child is going to play soccer, you sign a permission slip. If your child is going to not ride the bus home from the basketball game, you send an email to.

Let them know who they're going to ride with.

So it's just the opportunity to give that consent that says you can sit down with your kid and say, you know what, TikTok is not for you, why don't we try be real? Or you can say you know, yeah, you can do Instagram, but I want you to understand that every post, every like, every comment doesn't just stay with you today, it stays with you forever. And we are in a different error where social media and the ability to cyberbully.

I call it virtual egging.

I mean back when we grew up, it would have been you know, egging someone's house, or they.

Rolled it, or they did this or that.

Now it's it's in a way that's displayed for the whole world to see, and it's challenging. You add that with front facing cameras and it's a lot. And the last thing that this bill does is it just says, you cannot use algorithms against our kids. And I think that this may be the most important part, but it's what the social media companies have the biggest issue with because the age is thirteen to seventeen, that's where you can't use the algorithms under this bill. Is actually one of the most profitable demographics for these social media companies. We have found that the longer youth stay on certain content, then the more money that can be made. Well, the more depressing the content, the longer people stay on. We have seen across the nation between twenty eleven and twenty nineteen the rate of depression.

More than doubled.

When you looked at that and during that time period from our youth, and it coincides exactly with when the rise of social media occurred. We look at last year, one and three high school young women said she seriously considered taking her home life and then Lisa actually one in nine high school kids said they actually attempted death by suicide.

And you know, as a mom, you know this.

I'm raising I have a thirteen year old and a fourteen year old. I see it in my own home. I talk to my friends, we talk about what they're going through and we've got to do something.

I mean, as.

Adults, we are challenged in this space and how to handle it. We've got to do more to put up proper guardrails to protect our kids, to allow them to be kids and allow them to grow and flourish and health the environment.

Let's take a quick commercial break more a centator bread. On the other side, we look at what happened to Kevin McCarthy, you know Aliston, Speaker of the House. You know Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee, is facing indictments. I just I worry about how we're going to look to independence next year. How do you think we win them over?

I think we talk about these very issues that we're talking about right now. I mean, people they want leaders that lead in a way that allow others to follow. They want people to talk about the things that matter. We have record high inflation. You look at the prices at the gas pump. I mean, that's what my friends are talking about. You know, we're talking about where we can buy milk at a better price, which grocery store we need to go to, or where the gas prices are lower in the city. People are looking.

At crime on the I mean, we look at the disaster that has occurred all across our country.

We've highlighted it over this past week, both of what happened with Congressman Quaar among others in DC, what happened in New York.

With fatal stabbings.

We've got to return to law and order. We have got to return to a place where we're protecting the American dream for the next generation and providing opportunity. Americans want to know that their leaders understand what they're going through and that we are working diligently to put them in the best place possible. They don't want to be forgotten, they don't want to be put last. And that's exactly what's happening from this administration and their field policies over and over and over again. So I think people at the end of the day will know that we need to make sure that Joe Biden is a one term president. We need to get back to governing, and we need to get back to making sure that the rest of the world knows that Americans are safer and stronger with Reublicans in office, and and that we put those policies in place that make sure that that that is the case across the nation.

A well said Senator. I hope you're on the forefront of messaging that. Glad we were able to see past the football rivalry.

I appreciate you so much and go.

I don't know if you're I know, I didn't not understand this. I don't know if they're going to need them to google this rivalry because it's it's it's very real, and it's very real. So I appreciate you giving me a shot despite the fact that I'm an Alabama grad.

Yeah, I figured let's just get it out of the way and then we'll address that my room.

That's e I like it a lot. You know, Rocky Top. We heard it quite a bit.

Every Tennessee fan in the state of Alabama, I think has played it continuously, uh since last year's win. So we are we're hoping to rectify that this year and get things back on the right track.

Well, we'll have to have you back on after after the games.

We'll see you. I'll see what happens, all right. Well, I love it. I love that. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Sedator.

Hey, thank you, Leehy and thank you for bringing attention to these important issues and to your audience. We need you all talking about this. We need to spread the word. We have got to end the national security and humanitarian crisis that's happening at the border, and we've got to make sure that we put policies in place that preserve the American dream and make sure that our country is both safe and strong.

So thank you so much.

That was Senator Katie Britt from the state of Alabama. I hope you enjoyed her as much as I did. I really enjoyed that conversation. She should be out front on all of these issues for the Republican Party. Appreciate you guys at home for listening every Monday and Thursday, but you can listen throughout the week. What do you think John Cassio and my producer for putting the show together. Until next time.