Jan Brewer Quotes

Americans are rightly concerned about the security and the integrity of the nation's borders because the system is broken. Some are concerned about the possibility of terrorists crossing our borders and coming into our cities.

We do not control our borders. We don’t know who is coming across and we don’t know what is coming across.

Undoubtedly, Mexico's crime-related problems have become a focus of attention among lawmakers, law enforcement, and the media in the United States.

Illegal immigration is crisis for our country. It is an open door for drugs, criminals, and potential terrorists to enter our country. It is straining our economy, adding costs to our judicial, healthcare, and education systems.

In my experience, given how large the border is and given how many people are coming across the border, I mean, look, if a child can come across the border, and we know there's hundreds of thousands of children that have, then what makes you think that ISIS and terrorists can't?

Hopping the fence or wading the Rio Grande River isn't part of America's immigration process.

There needs to be more pressure on the Mexican government to stop the drugs and illegal immigrants on their side of the border instead of exporting them to the U.S.

Fifty thousand people in Mexico have been murdered. Puerto Penasco, 60 miles south of our border, just had five people and a police officer killed. That is like part of Arizona, and it is spilling over into our state.

I write about things that are important for us as Americans. I'm concerned about al-Qaeda sneaking across the border with the illegal immigrants that are using the coyotes to get across the border. And that's not a Democrat or Republican issue, that's a national security issue.

The expansion and sophistication of transnational crime represents one of the most dangerous threats we confront in the next millennium.

On my recent trip to the Mexico border, Border Patrol agents in California told me they have arrested the same coyotes 20 times, but they are not prosecuted.

Well, we have a crisis along the Mexican border right now, a state of emergency as declared by a bipartisan group of Texas House members just last fall. You know, we've had almost 200,000 OTMs - the government categorizes OT 'other, other than Mexicans' - along the Mexican border.

Consular offices make no attempt to determine whether the person obtaining the card is legally in the United States. In fact, the only people who need these cards are illegal immigrants, criminals and terrorists. Consular cards also are easily forged.

We cannot afford all this illegal immigration and everything that comes with it, everything from the crime and to the drugs and the kidnappings and the extortion and the beheadings and the fact that people can't feel safe in their community. It's wrong! It's wrong!

And the people who live in the southern part of my state do not have a secure environment. To wit, there are signs that the government put up that say, 'Warning. You are in a drug smuggling area and a human smuggling area.'

The people who illegally cross into the country are from countries that have very close ties to al Qaeda, whether it's Yemen or Afghanistan, Pakistan, China. It is an absolute national disgrace.

Well, you know, the violence is mostly in Mexico itself, at least the violence that people are worried about. And so we want to make sure that violence does not spill over into our communities that are along the border.

Drug smugglers often use juveniles to carry their shipments into the U.S. because they know the juveniles will not be prosecuted if caught.

Illegal immigrants all too often swell the ranks of organized crime.

They [illegal immigrants] would have young women who became pregnant and would get them into the United States to have a baby. They wouldn't even have to pay anything for the baby. And then they would return back where they could be raised and coddled as future terrorists. And then one day, 20, 30 years down the road, they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life.

The American people are a welcoming and generous people. But those who enter our country illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of law. And because we live in an age where terrorists are challenging our borders, we simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked. Americans are right to demand better border security and better enforcement of the immigration laws.

And so border security is not simply preventing people from getting in, but very often preventing somebody from leaving for the wrong reasons.

We know gang members are pouring across the border and filling up our prisons. We have a huge drug problem in this country now in places that never had an opiate problem. Why is that? Because this is brought in - because we do not have a border.

I think people all across the country want us to secure the border and make sure that terrorists are not coming into our country.

I will continue to fight to secure our borders and implement common sense policies aimed at reducing violence and the flow of illegal narcotics, firearms, people, and money across our borders.