State Sen. Matt Dolan is a Chagrin Falls Republican who chairs the Senate Finance Committee and has entered the 2024 race for Ohio’s U.S. Senate seat.
File photo
LIMA — U.S. Senate Candidate Matt Dolan (R-Chagrin Falls) made his way to the U.S. border at the beginning of April. Dolan traveled to Arizona alongside police officers from Ohio. Dolan currently serves as a Senate member in the Ohio State Senate. He announced his campaign for the 2024 election in January. Dolan will run in the 2024 primary election against Republican candidate Bernie Moreno. Both candidates hope to replace U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) in the November general election next year.
Dolan weighed in on the visit.
“I went to Arizona’s border,” said Dolan. “We saw a wall and a lot of the wall was built under the Obama administration. The rest was built under the Trump administration. Under the Biden administration that we stopped building right away just piles for miles of equipment that was needed to continue to build a wall have just been sitting there now, since January of 2021.”
“Literally, we saw people crossing the border, someone threw a rope over the wall. Climb down it real quick, it scampered off into the woods. At night, we rode with the Arizona officers and we saw migrants in the back of a pickup truck and that truck pulled over. They jumped up and ran off into the brush.”
Congressional Republicans, including Rep. Jim Jordan, have ramped up scrutiny of the U.S. southern border situation since President Joe Biden took office. The Biden adminstration halted work or began repairs on much of the work on a southern border wall that was started under President Donald Trump, citing safety and environmental concerns with the wall’s construction, but the Department of Homeland Security is continuing work on closing gaps in the barrier as of July 2022.
Dolan said he hopes to become elected to address what he observed.
“I want to go the U.S. and put pressure on the administration to say if Mexico won’t cooperate with us, then we need to look at the aid that we’re providing them,” said Dolan. “We got to look at suspending trade agreements until they understand that they have to cooperate with these cartels. And I have voted to call them terrorist organizations. So we need to act like their terrorist organization. But we have to do that with the support Mexican government. And Biden is refusing to do that.”
Dolan also said he hopes to build the wall, improve technology and give border patrol officers the ‘authority to act’.
For more information on Dolan and his campaign visit dolanforohio.com.
Reach Precious Grundy at 567-242-0351.
