The Trump State Department is ensuring that there are actual immigration vetting standards, Tommy Pigott, Principal Deputy spokesman at the U.S. Department of State, said during an appearance on Breitbart New Daily.
Host Mike Slater pointed to recent remarks made by the former ambassador to India, Eric Garcetti. He said since becoming ambassador, “We’ve increased our visas by more than 60 percent [and] eliminated wait times for all visa types,” Slater said.
“For the second year in a row, we’ve issued more than 1 million non-immigrant visas, including a record number of visitor visas. More than 5 million Indians currently hold multi-year, multi-use United States visas. He’s bragging about the amount of visas from India to America? What are you guys doing at the State Department today?” Slater asked.
“Well, look, what we’re doing is making sure we actually have vetting standards that mean that every single one of those visas is someone that should be coming to the United States, is somebody that will not harm our national security, is somebody that will not break our laws or violate the terms of their visas,” Pigott explained.
“So we’re making clear instead that visa security is border security, and we’re living through on that commitment increasing those vetting standards, and then when somebody’s here, as we’ve all seen, revoking that visa if necessary, if they break our laws, if they’re a threat to our national security, if they break the term of that visa,” he said, adding that they are also “enacting policies from certain countries to make sure that countries with high overstay rates or where we can’t screen someone that is applying for a visa, that we maybe have a pause on that visa.”
“Or we put other places into effect, other policies into effect, to make sure they’re not overstaying that visa, which is a form of illegal immigration. We’re not going to tolerate illegal immigration into this country,” he made clear, noting that this has been a huge form of illegal immigration often not talked about.
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“We always think of the Southwest border, but it’s huge, people overstaying their visas… One of these policies, the visa bond policies, which we which we announced, means that someone pays a bond when they apply for that visa and they get that money back when they return home. Some of these countries, we had overstay rates that were very high, and in countries where we’ve enacted this policy, we’ve seen those overstay rates go down to near zero,” he said, touting the success of that policy and adding that the bonds can be up to $15,000.
“It’s common sense,” Pigott said. “We’re not going to let people break our immigration laws.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
