MORGANTOWN – Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., joined with other GOP senators for a Wednesday press conference to urge the Biden administration to reverse course on its illegal immigration policy and stem the southern border crisis.
Under the Biden policies, Capito said, “No state is not a border state.” As ranking member on the Appropriations Committee, she’s said, “Setting your spending priorities shows your priorites as a nation.”
The bill for Department of Homeland Security funding, she said, contains no funding for the border wall and no increase in the DHS budget. Nothing for more agents or mechanisms to defend the southern border. “This tells you it is not a priority. … They didn’t have plan.” They just blame others.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, led the assembly, saying catch and release numbers have increased more than 430,000% in August compared to August 2020. “That’s a percentage so big you almost think it’s a typo.” And SHS is preparing for 400,000 illegals this month.
“The cause of all of this is simple,” he said. “It is Joe Biden and Kamala Harris who refuse to enforce the law.” While visiting the border he talked to farmers and ranchers who are finding corpses on their land, and moms who require their teens to go outside on their property with loaded guns to protect themselves.
Cruz said Biden took three actions on his first day in office and undoing them would help stem the flow.
One, Cruz said, he stopped wall construction – not just the physical wall as other senators noted, but everything associated with it. The government is paying contractors $5 million a day to not build it.
Two, he reinstated catch and release, Cruz said. Instead of validating each person’s need for asylum, they just let them in and ask them to appear for a hearing in two or three years.
Three, he ended the successful Remain in Mexico policy, Cruz said. As previously reported, Homeland Security established the Migrant Protection Protocols (nicknamed Remain in Mexico) in December 2018 to deter individuals without legal authorization or valid asylum claims from seeking to enter the United States by crossing the Southwest border. Asylum applicants attempting to cross the border were returned to Mexico during expedited processing of their claims rather than held in detention or paroled into the United States.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said criminal organizations are getting rich charging fees to smuggle illegals. And their strategy of overwhelming the Border Patrol with unaccompanied children or sheer numbers opens lanes to smuggle drugs.
While Biden says the GOP has proposed no solutions, he said, he and a GOP colleague and two Democrats have introduced the Bipartisan Border Solutions Act. “So far all we hear from the administration is crickets.”
A summary of the bill says it “would allow the U.S. to respond more effectively to increases in arriving migrants by creating regional border processing centers, expediting the asylum process, improving access to legal services and providing additional resources and personnel for border processing.”
Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said illegal immigration numbers are already the highest in 21 years and September’s numbers will set a new record. While a federal court has ordered Biden to reinstate Remina in Mexico, he hasn’t and his people won’t provide accurate immigration numbers.
“This administration is intentionally dragging their feet,” he said.
Other senators discussed health issues, noting that 20% of the people in “Biden cages” are COVID positive, and 7,000 positive illegals were released into the town of McCallen, Texas; a third of those crossing refuse vaccines.
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, said by the end of the year, 2.3 million illegals will have crossed the border; there are 10 U.S. states with fewer people than that. “The reality is now that every state is a border state.”
TWEET David Beard @dbeardtdp EMAIL dbeard@dominionpost.com
