NEW YORK – Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) visited Texas on April 8 to see conditions for herself at the southern border of the United States and criticized the Biden administration’s handling of the border crisis, the New York Post reported on April 10.

“President Biden has turned over our border to the cartels,” Malliotakis told the Post after visiting the Rio Grande Valley with a group of House GOP colleagues.

She also told the Post, “it angered me to see how the smugglers have just taken over. It’s completely chaotic. How could anybody who has a heart let this go on, knowing how people are being exploited?”

“According to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents who briefed the legislators, Mexican cartels are taking advantage of Biden’s porous border policies to make billions,” the Post reported.

“The bottom line is, this is a business for the cartels,” Malliotakis said, the Post reported. “They are making an estimated half-billion dollars a month — first with human trafficking, then with the guns, the drugs. And one feeds off the other.”

“With CBP resources strained as officers tend the migrants the cartels have sent flooding over the border — 172,000 people in March alone — the criminals can freely shuttle weapons, narcotics, gang members, and even potential terrorists into the US through unguarded areas, the lawmakers were told,” the Post reported.

“They said the cartels exploit children to use them as scouts,” Malliotakis told the Post. “And if CBP comes too close — in one case two weeks ago, the smugglers threw a 6-month-old over the raft into the water, because it diverted the agents to go save the baby and let them get away.”

“Cartels are actively recruiting migrants from far beyond Central America, she was told: at least 60 countries are represented at the migrant holding facility in Donna, TX,” the Post reported.

“It’s not like these people are coming spontaneously,” Malliotakis continued, the Post reported. “This is an organized criminal operation that President Biden has allowed to occur by undoing the actions that President Trump took to try to create some order at the border.”

Malliotakis photographed children “sleeping on top of each other,” in the Donna holding center, the Post reported, adding that it “was built for 250 people but now houses 4,000 migrants for weeks at a time.”

“These kids are in what they call a pod. It’s meant for 33 people, but you have like 100 of them in there. Zero social distancing,” Malliotakis told the Post. “We saw kids who were crying, very scared and alone. The ones who were sent by themselves — they don’t know why they’re there, they don’t know where their families are. Absolutely heartbreaking.”

During the visit, Malliotakis said, the delegation saw groups of migrants “many of them were holding babies and small children,”  the Post reported adding that this is “because they and the cartels know that under Biden’s executive order, anyone traveling with a child under age 7 won’t be turned away.”

“A broken policy that is being exploited by these smugglers,” Malliotakis said, noting that it is “no surprise that Roberta Jacobson, the former U.S. ambassador to Mexico who had served as Biden’s ‘border czar,’ announced her departure Friday [April 9].”

“Even his ‘czar’ recognizes that this is a national disgrace and a direct result of President Biden’s misguided executive orders,” Malliotakis told the Post. “It’s only going to get worse unless the President admits this failure and undoes his policies. The president should be here to hear from the customs and border officers who are begging for assistance. And Kamala Harris has been given this responsibility. She needs to come here and see what we saw.”

“I don’t know how anyone could see this and not call it a humanitarian crisis. And it’s all being encouraged by our president,” Malliotakis concluded, the Post reported.