Former Michigan and current U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican, says he disagrees with Democrats’ claims that the border is secure and that crime isn’t a problem.

Rogers is seeking to replace Michigan’s retiring Sen. Debbie Stabenow in a tight race against Democrat Rep. Elissa Slotkin.

In an interview late last month with The Midwesterner, Rogers said the Biden-Harris administration’s open border and liberal immigration policies directly threaten national security and community safety. Some of his remarks quoted below are edited for clarity.

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“We believe thousands of people have crossed the border who have terrorist minded interests running around the country,” Rogers said. “We have organized crime groups, vicious organized crime groups, that come through that Southern border,” he said. “We don’t know who they are and we don’t know where they are, but we have a general idea what they’re up to and none of it is good.”

Rogers continued, saying, “When you talk about the sheer level of human trafficking that’s now happening at that Southern border, that should be a point of embarrassment for Democrats and this administration. These poor women are being pushed into sexual trafficking and children. Here’s the other thing: Men are being extorted. They’re processing them through the border, these are organized crime groups on our Southern border sending them to work, then they threaten to kill their family if [the workers who are extorted] don’t send back 10 or 15 or 20% of their wages,” he said.

“We have created a multibillion dollar organized crime operation on our southern border that’s bad for us when we’re trying to make sure we don’t have a terrorist attack,” Rogers added. “It’s certainly bad when we’re trying to keep criminals out of our neighborhood and, speaking of criminals, coming into your neighborhood.”

Rogers recounted some of the criminal acts committed in Michigan by illegal immigrants.

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“We’ve had illegals here just in the last couple of weeks,” he said. “He had raped a minor and we find out that it wasn’t his first one. He had been deported before, by the way. We found somebody who exposed himself to a nine-year-old girl who was an illegal immigrant that had been deported seven times and came back through an open border,” he said.

“I’ll tell you, as a law enforcement guy,  that’s just his first step if he hasn’t already conducted a sexual assault somewhere and just didn’t get caught,” Rogers said. “We had in my home county a sexual assault of a minor. We had Ruby Garcia, in Grand Rapids, was killed by an illegal immigrant.”

Rogers noted that fentanyl coming through the Southern border has killed 3000 Michigan citizens.

“This isn’t a southern border problem, this is an America problem, and it’s taking the lives of our children and our families right here.”

He concluded: “I’m telling you the the thing that bugs me the most is when they say, ‘Oh well, you know the crime rate is no higher than an average person’s crime rate.’ These illegal immigrant crimes are preventable if you would have had a border that had control on it, that had security on it, that had vetting on it. They took all of that away and now these people have to live with the scars of these vicious crimes committed to their families. I hope people stand up in November and make Democrats pay a price for what they’ve done to their safety of their communities and their families.”