Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is locked in a fierce battle for reelection this year, but he doesn’t necessarily consider that his biggest challenge. “In the 12 years I’ve been in the Senate, I have consistently led the fight to secure our border,” he told the Washington Examiner. “It is today I believe in an existential threat to Texas and to our nation.”

Cruz is campaigning heavily on his work, sometimes on a bipartisan basis, to mitigate the pressure on the border. This includes authoring successful amendments mandating information-sharing between the Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to safeguard the maritime border as well as promoting new security initiatives from South Padre Island to Port Mansfield. This includes funding for an air station at one Texas Coast Guard facility and an aerostat radar system.

But Cruz is keenly aware of the national implications of a porous border and believes that if it is not gotten under control, the results will not be good for his country or party.

Texas is ground zero for President Joe Biden’s border crisis. The threat Cruz warned about has not abated since Vice President Kamala Harris, once tasked with addressing the “root causes” of uncontrolled migration at the southern border, replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

“They are trying desperately to run away from [their] record, including the absurd gaslighting of now denying that she was ever the border czar,” Cruz said. “Joe Biden very publicly named her the border czar. In her entire time as vice president, she has been to the border only once. And she chose to go to El Paso and not what was then the epicenter of the crisis, which was the Rio Grande Valley.”

More than 10 million illegal immigrants have streamed across the border since the Biden-Harris administration took office, a figure that does not count nearly 2 million known “gotaways” who have evaded federal authorities. The consequences of this level of unregulated migration are felt far from border states like Texas, dominating the headlines in places like New York and Colorado. 

Naturally, this has gone over poorly with the voters. Biden receives some of his lowest marks on his handling of immigration and the border. When Biden dropped out of the presidential race, his job approval rating on immigration was 32 points underwater, according to a Wall Street Journal poll. The national RealClearPolitics polling average on this issue found that 34.4% of voters approve of the job Biden has done, while 61.6% disapprove. Just this month, with the migration numbers somewhat improved, an Economist-YouGov survey gave Biden a 36% approval rating in this area.

Immigration is one of several reasons Harris had worse poll numbers than Biden for much of her vice presidency before the big ticket switch. Her allies derided her policy portfolio as “trash,” expressing concern she was being set up to fail. The Rev. Al Sharpton told the Root in 2021 that he planned to take up the matter with Biden. “I want to see her be used more effectively, and I think her being in charge of voting was important, but I question her other assignments,” Sharpton said at the time.

Harris has attempted a rebrand on immigration since she leapfrogged Biden for the top spot, not limited to memory-holing the border czar label. One of her early presidential campaign ads tried to make her sound like, well, Ted Cruz.

“Kamala Harris has spent decades fighting violent crime. As a border state prosecutor, she took on drug cartels and jailed gang members for smuggling weapons and drugs across the border,” the ad said. “As vice president, she backed the toughest border control bill in decades. And as president, she will hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking.”

“Fixing the border is tough,” the spot concluded. “So is Kamala Harris.”

Politico described this as “part of an aggressive effort by the Harris campaign to flip the issue of immigration and border security, long a political liability for Democrats and the vice president in particular.” CNN reported, “She tried to flip the script on one of her most vulnerable issues in this election, immigration.” According to the Washington Post, Harris “has tried to flip the script on the Republican attacks on her immigration record.”

Cruz doesn’t buy Harris’s conversion story. But why would she court this political backlash over the border for most of Biden’s term? “This is the outcome she wants,” he said of the high rate of illegal immigration under the current administration. “She wants the 11.5 million people who have crossed illegally into this country to become 20 million and to become 30 million and to become 40 million because they look at every one of these illegal immigrants as a key to their staying in power.”

In Cruz’s telling, the border fiasco is less about incompetence than a deliberate strategy. “Joe Biden did something that I previously thought was impossible,” he said. “Which is he made me miss Barack Obama.”

“As bad as Barack Obama was as president, and I disagreed with him vigorously on many, many issues, when it came to immigration, other than DACA, Obama, by and large, followed the law,” continued Cruz, referring to the program that shielded from deportation a subset of illegal immigrants who arrived in the U.S. when they were young. “Obama deported millions of people if you recall.”

Obama believed that a certain level of enforcement was necessary to establish the credibility to pass immigration legislation that would give some form of legal status to most of the illegal immigrants living in the U.S. But the Left derided him as the “deporter-in-chief” and conservatives largely hardened their opposition to an immigration amnesty, with the bipartisan Gang of Eight bill going nowhere in 2013. (Cruz, then a freshman senator, was among its leading opponents.)

Biden later called Obama’s approach “a big mistake” as he sought the 2020 Democratic nomination. (Though his administration has touted its deportation numbers since taking office.) Many of Biden’s primary opponents, including Harris, ran to his left on immigration. Some seemed to imply that it was illegitimate and racially discriminatory for wealthy countries to pursue strong immigration and border enforcement. There were calls, including from Harris, to decriminalize illegal border crossings, one of many previous policy positions the vice president has recanted this year.

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris came in. They inherited incredible success at the border,” Cruz said, noting the record of former President Donald Trump, the 2024 GOP nominee. “And they deliberately and systematically broke the border.” He identified the cessation of border wall construction, the reinstatement of “catch and release” for apprehended undocumented migrants, and the end of the “Remain in Mexico” policy, all reversals of Trump decisions, as the chief initial border-busting moves.

“Our Constitution was not designed to handle a chief executive who brazenly flouts federal law,” Cruz said. “Article 2 of the Constitution puts an obligation on the president to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. We have never had a president over two centuries of our nation’s history do what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have done.”

Cruz has written legislation requiring that every ICE detention bed be filled to ensure captured illegal immigrants remain in custody. He has sought to resume building the border wall and to use money seized from El Chapo and other drug kingpins for wall funding and other border security measures. He has advocated stiffening penalties for failing to appear in immigration court and fighting sanctuary cities. But the Senate has been controlled by Democrats since January 2021.

“So long as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris continue to lead the executive branch, we will have chaos at our southern border,” he said. “And the reason is that they want chaos at the southern border.”

All this could change next year. Yet the race for congressional majorities and the White House remains competitive. Cruz’s contest is no different. While most polls favor the incumbent senator over his challenger, Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX) — Cruz is up by 7.4 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics polling average — this seat is a top liberal target nationally. Democrats were heartened by an August University of Houston poll showing Allred closing to be within 2 points.

“If Democrats in November win the White House and win the House and if they gain just one seat in the Senate, in January of next year they will have the votes to end the filibuster,” Cruz warned. “They are one vote away from ending the filibuster. When they do that, they will be able to pass whatever legislation they want with 50 votes.”

To Cruz, amnesty and voting rights for illegal immigrants sit alongside D.C. statehood, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) bill to ensure greater federal control of elections, and packing the Supreme Court as priorities for further consolidating power from there.

“By the way, the instant they did that, Texas would become blue,” Cruz said of passing amnesty. “The governor of Texas would lose. The lieutenant governor of Texas would lose. The attorney general would lose. The nine Republican Supreme Court justices right now, all nine of them would become Democrats.”

“Texas would instantly become California,” he added. “It wouldn’t be a gradual process. It would be instantaneous.”

Politics can be unpredictable as actions spark reactions. Right now, many polls show Trump and Harris essentially tied among Hispanic men, which is not what many political experts would have predicted eight years ago. A Gallup poll released in July found that 55% of U.S. adults want a decrease in immigration, the first majority recorded for that position since 2005 and the highest percentage since 2001. Just 16% want immigration increased. Other polls have shown a rise in support for mass deportations of illegal immigrants.

These numbers are a direct response to the problems at the border under Biden and Harris. But Cruz believes the short-term political backlash would be worth it for the Democrats if they could turn Texas blue in the process.

That may explain why Cruz sounds so alarmed despite being the favorite in his reelection bid.

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“I have led the charge at every front against Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s open-border policy,” Cruz said. “That includes repeatedly taking my colleagues down to the border to see firsthand what is happening. You cannot understand the scope of this crisis until you see it with your own eyeballs.”

If Cruz is right about the bigger picture, soon they might not have to travel so far.

W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.