MESQUITE, Nev. — Arizona Democrat Kirsten Engel is talking tough on the border in her bid to unseat Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani — but in private she pooh-poohed the mass-migration crisis as a made-up story in “the national script.”
“Washington has failed Arizona. I will fight to ensure we have a secure, fair, orderly and humane process at the border,” the former state senator proclaims on her campaign website.
She used that tough tone in a debate this month, where she conceded the Biden-Harris administration was too little, too late in addressing the surge of illegal border crossings and accused her opponent of marching in lockstep with Donald Trump to block President Biden’s “bipartisan” border bill — which critics say wouldn’t have done much to curb the influx of undocumented arrivals.
Away from the debate stage, Engel takes a softer tone on the flow of mass migration into the Tucson-area border district she hopes to represent in Congress.
Cook Political Report rates the race a toss-up.
Video footage The Post obtained reveals the candidate claimed 6th District constituents want to lay down the welcome mat for illegal migrants.
“A lot of the communities in southern Arizona are frustrated,” she says in one video call. “They want people to come to their communities. They know that they are a gateway [for] trade and commerce on the border, and yet they are dogged by the national script on the border being a crisis.”
In another video meeting, she claimed the flow of illegal immigrants has “dropped significantly,” an apparent reference to the Biden administration’s late tightening of entry rules after a 42-month barrage of entries and “gotaways” who eluded Border Patrol agents.
Engel even managed to blame Americans for the fentanyl crisis that flows over the wide-open southern border, saying on tape it isn’t immigrants trafficking in the deadly drug but “US citizens driving trucks.”
Given Engel’s convenient and convoluted evolution on border policy, Republicans aren’t buying her suddenly strict stance.
“Kirsten Engel has never changed her dangerously extreme open-borders views. Just put her in front of some San Francisco liberals, and she’ll show you her 2024 rebrand is a complete scam,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Ben Petersen told The Post.
Petersen noted Engel denied the existence of a border crisis in her 2022 congressional bid, which she lost to Ciscomani.
The Engel campaign did not return The Post’s request for comment.
