“We are essentially borrowing money from China to buy plane tickets to fly these illegal aliens who are sneaking into America,” said Rep. Steve King (R-IA) during a Friday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour and guest host Frances Martel.

King described how those in the 1,500 caravan traveling from Central America to the U.S. via Mexico are challenging American sovereignty and exploiting humanitarian refugee laws.

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King said, “When we’re in a situation where you have an invading army — mostly unarmed — but an invading army of 1,500 that starts off 1,500 miles away and says, ‘We are marching to America. We’re going to sneak into the country. We’re going to storm her borders, and once we set foot on U.S. soil, they have to treat us as asylees.’ And they’ve all been trained to say all the right words: ‘I fear going back to my home country because I have a credible fear that I’ll be killed if I go back home.’”

Dale Wilcox, executive director and general counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), similarly described what he said were the “magic words” migrants used with U.S. officials upon reaching American soil.

Wilcox explained, “They have surely coached them on what to say. The magic words are, ‘I have a credible fear of persecution in my country,’ and they automatically, under our law, if they have entered the United States and actually make it across the border, they say those magic words, and then they must be given a credible fair hearing by an immigration law judge. So it is disturbing what’s going on and how our system is being abused.”

King blamed Democrats for passing a law vulnerable to exploitation by migrants disingenuously posturing as refugees.

King said, “There was a really foolish law that was slipped in in the dark of the night. The Democrats went down to the floor some years ago after everybody went to the airport and slipped it in by unanimous consent — House and Senate — that requires that we treat asylees in a fashion that they get a hearing, a lawyer, and, of course, tie up a courtroom and judge, and that hearing date is set when they walk across the Rio Grande River or wade across or float across. It is often longer than a year before the hearing is even scheduled.”

Illegal aliens are being flown within the U.S. at the taxpayers’ expense, said King. “We are essentially borrowing money from China to buy plane tickets to fly these illegal aliens who are sneaking into America and declaring credible fear to all of the 50 states in the Union, including Hawaii and Alaska. That’s how bad this is.”

King also noted a recent rise in illegal crossings through the southern border. He said, “The numbers have accelerated dramatically. I went down to McAllen, Texas, last October, and they showed us how there had been a reduction in those crossings, but it’s back to the old numbers again, and it’s been getting greater.”

King called for reform to existing refugee admission laws. “So one thing we need is, we need to change the statute that was slipped in in that dark of the night so that we can immediately deport those who come to America illegally back to the country that they came from, their last country before they stepped into the United States; that would be Mexico in most cases,” claimed King. “We need to do it boldly and abruptly.”

Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.