Any legislation that does not “cut off and eliminate all illegal entry into the United States,” according to a border county official in Arizona, should be rejected by Congress along with the Senate’s border security plan.
“Do not vote yes on the bill,” Yuma County Supervisor Jonathan Lines stated. “Sit down with the Freedom Caucus, sit down with all interested parties and establish what needs to be done as a baseline, which is shutting the border down right now.”
“There are thousands of people on their way,” he continued. “There is a pipeline to the United States. You see them in airports, you see them in police stations sleeping on the floor, you see cities that are unable to care for these people. They don’t have the resources to do it and it’s simply because these numbers continue to multiply on a daily basis.”
On Sunday night, a long-awaited bipartisan agreement on border security was unveiled. Its goal is to take control of the asylum system, which has been overrun by historically large numbers of migrants who are flooding the border.
Additionally, if a threshold is met, the president and the Department of Homeland Security would have the authority to temporarily seal the border in the event of overcrowding and to force a shutdown.
Lines stated that although the law is an excellent “jumping off point,” it isn’t aggressive enough to stop the flow of people entering the nation illegally. He suggested it was time to bring back some of the restrictions from the Trump administration.
“Like the proverbial boy putting his finger in the dam, we need to cut off and eliminate all illegal entry into the United States,” Lines stated. “Shut down the border, shut down fentanyl trafficking, shut down human trafficking, cut off the supply to the cartels who are in every state, who are taking advantage of their integrated supply routes.”
The bipartisan package would provide $20 billion for immigration enforcement, which would include $650 million for the construction and fortification of the border wall, as well as the hiring of hundreds of Border Patrol agents and thousands of extra officers to assess asylum cases.
Additionally, it would allow a specific number of refugees to work while their asylum requests are being processed.
A five-day average of more than 5,000 illegal border encounters would trigger the automatic activation of an expulsion authority, which would send migrants back to Mexico without giving them a chance to apply for asylum. Presidential administrations would be able to use the deportation authority if the figure reached 4,000.
Customs and Border Patrol reports that in December, there were 302,000 interactions with migrants, an all-time high. Based by CBP data, border interactions have exceeded 5,000 on all but seven days throughout the last four months.
As soon as the bill is signed into law, President Biden promised to “shut down the border” using his authority. However, House Speaker Mike Johnson declared that the bill would be “dead on arrival” in the lower house, even if it passed the Senate.
“Instead of setting a threshold, whatever it might be, I think we need to go back to getting control of the border first and foremost, before we can address any type of a number type system or identify how many people we will allow in,” Lines told. “We’ve got around 8 to 10 million people that still need to be adjudicated, and I am seeing dates into the 2030s for people to go before a federal judge.”
“So knowing that we have that type of backlog, why would we continue to allow people to come in unvetted and remain here waiting for adjudication?” he added.
Along with Johnson, a number of House Republicans have expressed disapproval of the $118 billion spending agreement, claiming that its provisions are insufficiently stringent when it comes to reducing illegal immigration.
Critics point out that it is attached to the Democrats’ proposal for additional aid, which would have given $60 billion to Ukraine, $14 billion to Israel, and $10 billion in humanitarian help for people “caught in conflict zones.”
Lines stated that although supporting American allies has to be a top priority, the border dispute shouldn’t be connected to matters concerning international crises.
“We need to separate Ukraine from Israel from our U.S. border,” he stated. “We need to tackle those problems independently because they’re so different. We can’t just put riders into these bills that send out money by the millions and even billions to these different areas.”
