'Need a state sovereignty Renaissance' to secure borders under Biden, says ex-Trump official

States will have to step up and enforce their own policies to combat illegal immigration, since the Biden administration is just letting border crossers enter the country, says former Trump administration official John Zadrozny.

"[W]e need a state sovereignty Renaissance over the next three years" to combat the influx of illegal immigrants under the Biden administration," Zadrozny told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Wednesday.

As states begin new legislative sessions in January, many of them will be "fighting to pass laws that protect their internal security, strengthening law enforcement, [and] ending pull factors" for illegal immigration, such as "welfare and driver's licenses for illegal aliens" on the state and local level, said Zadrozny, now director of the Center for Homeland Security and Immigration of the America First Policy Institute.

"[I]f you're waiting for help from Washington, you're going to be waiting a long time," he said. "And states and localities are going to have to start shaping their own destiny."

People have "fallen for this mantra that ... immigration is a federal issue," said Zadrozny. But while granting citizenship and issuing visas are done on the federal level, he acknowledged, "providing safety for your citizens is state and local."

Prodded by a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and other anti-border-security groups, the Biden administration is considering paying $450,000 to illegal immigrants who were separated from their families at the border under the Trump administration.

"They're basically rewarding illegal immigration," Zadrozny said. "And they're doing it in such a way that, to me, it just seems very insulting to almost every American. I mean, that $450,000 — that's a lot of money. And Lord knows, the federal government would fight tooth and nail to prevent any U.S. citizen from recovering comparable damages in any suit against the federal government. We know that the Department of Justice would work overtime to prevent that.

"But here, they're actually talking to the ACLU to make it happen. It's also very insulting in the sense that it's more money than most victims' families of the 9/11 attacks have received, it's more money than any Gold Star families have received. Tomorrow's Veterans Day, so I think a lot of people are paying attention to the egregiousness of that."

Zadrozny said that if Republicans regain control of the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm elections, they should cut the budget of the Department of Justice by at least 10%.

"[I]f we've learned anything over the last five years, we've learned that the federal government is too large and too dangerous and has too much money," he said. "And if you want to rein in the lawlessness of the Department of Justice and other parts of the federal government, you got to cut their budgets." 

Sending letters to inspector generals of federal agencies and holding congressional hearings "never results in the reduction of an agency's budget," Zadrozny said. "They just keep rolling in their corrupt form with all the taxpayer dollars they get, and then they just keep getting more money."

If Republicans become the majority in the House and cut the budgets of these agencies, it "would send the signal of, 'We're not going to let you dish out this money to illegal aliens or other nefarious actors anymore,'" he added.