When House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy led a group of House Republicans to the U.S.-Mexico border this year, he had a warning for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas about what Republicans would do if they were in charge. “At any time, if someone is derelict in their job, there is always the option of impeaching,” McCarthy told a crowd of reporters gathered near the border in April. Months away from the midterm elections that could flip control of the House, Republican lawmakers already are plotting how they’ll handle immigration issues if they emerge victorious in November. Stuck in the minority for four years, they’re eager to restart construction on former President Donald Trump’s border wall and undo Biden-era immigration policies. They also want to ramp up accountability for Biden administration officials such as Mayorkas, whom they blame for historically high border crossings. This month, the House Republican Conference is poised to unveil plans for a future majority, developed by its American Security Task Force. Border security is expected to be a key component of that plan. It’s a strategy that will ensure they’re prepared to take immediate action in January if they win. But it’s also a crucial part of their pitch to voters, including a deeply conservative base that has counted immigration as a top issue since Trump made it a centerpiece of his efforts as president. “This is affecting all Americans of all backgrounds,” said California Rep. Tom McClintock, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Immigration and Citizenship Subcommittee. “Every community in America is becoming a border community.” Legislative EffortsRepublicans have not controlled the House since 2018 and are well positioned to win it back this November amid President Joe Biden’s dismal approval ratings, record-high inflation and historical patterns suggesting one party never controls both chambers of Congress and the White House for long. With Democrats still in control of the presidency and possibly the Senate, House Republicans say they would use their majority to pursue legislation that may not make it into law but would show voters what Republicans could accomplish if they controlled the whole government. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who is poised to lead the Judiciary Committee if Republicans win the House, pointed to a Trump-era policy that required migrants to wait in Mexico pending decisions in their U.S. immigration court cases. More OversightIf they win, Republicans will likely use their newfound oversight powers in the House majority to lambaste the Biden administration on a variety of fronts, including the Afghanistan withdrawal, inflation and border security.
Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins is poised to become the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee after the retirement of current ranking member John Katko, R-N.Y. Higgins said oversight efforts in his committee will center on Mayorkas, whom Republicans uniformly blame for a spike in border crossings and policies they say have incentivized illegal migration. Those policies include a more focused approach to enforcement and the exemption of some groups from pandemic-era asylum restrictions. Politics, too Republicans’ pitch for action comes at a time of historically high encounters with migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border. The high numbers can be attributed in part to pandemic-era asylum restrictions under the public health directive known as Title 42, which encourages migrants to make multiple attempts to cross the border, as well as poor economic and humanitarian conditions in Latin and Central American countries. But Republicans say the Biden administration’s decision to stop Title 42 expulsions of unaccompanied children and attempts to end the Remain in Mexico program have sent a message to migrants that the border is open. “These numbers are not something that can be hidden in the shadows,” McClintock said. “I think that the American people are becoming very concerned over this mass incursion from our southern border.” Roy, who represents a district in South Texas, says emphasizing border security could help Republicans win votes in the Hispanic community, where they already began making significant inroads in the 2020 election cycle. WASHINGTON — Eighteen months into the Biden administration, immigration reform has stalled despite campaign promises to reform the system, with the most recent movement on immigration policy doled out by the U.S. Supreme Court and in lower federal courts. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Biden administration in a 5-4 decision on June 30 that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not violate federal immigration law when it moved to end the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, known as the Migrant Protection Protocols. It was a rare win for President Joe Biden amid a string of defeats at the end of the court’s term, including on abortion and climate change. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said during an interview with ABC News on Sunday last week that the agency is planning to end the Trump-era program that forced migrants seeking asylum to remain in Mexico while their cases were being processed through the U.S. immigration court system. But he said it will take time. “We need to wait until the Supreme Court’s decision is actually communicated to the lower courts, to the federal District Court and the Northern District of Texas, and, once that occurs, the District Court should lift its injunction that is preventing us from ending the program,” Mayorkas said. There are about 30,000 pending MPP cases, according to tracking by Syracuse University. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, criticized the Biden administration for moving to end the “Remain in Mexico” policy. “This decision will send yet another signal to the trafficking networks and cartels that America’s border is wide open,” Rubio said in a written statement. “President Biden’s reckless rhetoric and actions are encouraging illegal immigration and hurting our country.” Humanitarian InjusticeBut Sen. Ben Ray Luján, a New Mexico Democrat, said in a statement that the end of the program “is the first step toward remedying years of humanitarian injustice.” “This dangerous, xenophobic policy established by the Trump administration has forced tens of thousands of vulnerable children, families, and other asylum seekers into unsafe conditions before their asylum requests can even be heard,” he said. Luján added that he is continuing to work with his colleagues in the Senate “to continue my career-long push to fix our broken immigration system.” Noting the horrifying discovery of 53 migrants who died in an abandoned tractor trailer in Texas while attempting to cross into the United States, Mayorkas called for Congress to pass immigration reform. He also defended the administration messaging on deterring migrants from crossing the U.S. border. Republicans have repeatedly attacked Biden on border policy. “Because the border has been a challenge for decades, ultimately Congress must pass legislation to once and for all fix our broken immigration system,” Mayorkas said during the ABC interview. Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was quick to blame Biden for the deaths of the migrants found in the tractor trailer. “These deaths are on Biden,” Abbott wrote on Twitter. “They are a result of his deadly open border policies.” While aboard Air Force One, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that “the fact of the matter is the border is closed, which is in part why you see people trying to make this dangerous journey using smuggling networks.” Dreamers’ Fate in the CourtsWithout congressional action, the nearly 825,000 undocumented people covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as Dreamers, remain in limbo as oral arguments took place in a lower court in Louisiana on Wednesday.
The program allows children who were brought to the country illegally to obtain documentation for work and allows them to remain in the country. Texas — in its lawsuit originally with Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, and West Virginia — argued that DACA placed an undue burden on the states and that the Obama administration didn’t follow proper procedures when implementing the program. The program was meant to be a temporary fix, until a path to citizenship for those children, who are now adults, could be put in place by Congress, but in June the program entered its 10th year. ‘The System Is Creating Death': Calls for Immigration Reform Follow Migrant Tragedy in San Antonio6/29/2022
Policy experts and immigration attorneys argue that it’s decades of failed immigration policy — not one party or administration — that led to Monday's tragedy and others like it.
Just hours after news broke Monday that dozens of people — later confirmed to be migrants — were found dead inside a tractor-trailer in San Antonio, lawmakers and advocacy groups took part in a partisan blame game. Gov. Greg Abbott blamed the president in a tweet: “These deaths are on at Biden. They are a result of his deadly open border policies.” The League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, instead blamed Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, a state-funded and -operated border-security mission, and former President Trump’s immigration policies. “The politics of President Trump and Governor Abbott to build the wall, deport them all, and Operation Lone Star have all been abysmal failures,” said Domingo Garcia, LULAC’s national president. But policy experts and immigration attorneys argue that it’s decades of failed immigration policy — not one party or administration — that led to the tragedy and others like it. “The idea that any one president is responsible for things like this is simply not in line with the facts. And, similarly, we have seen incidents like this occur in countries around the world,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy director at the American Immigration Council, a Washington-based research and advocacy organization. “This is evidence of the systematic failure of the United States and other nations to update their legal immigration systems for a modern era of global displacement.” The death toll after Monday’s discovery increased to at least 51 Tuesday after some migrants taken to the hospital later died, Texas Public Radio reported. Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrand said 22 of the migrants were Mexican, seven were from Guatemala, two were from Honduras, and the remaining people have not yet been identified. Though the number of fatalities is staggering compared to other smuggling events, Reichlin-Melnick said, the motivation that led to similar tragedies was the same. “The last time we updated our legal immigration system was November 1990, months before the first website went online,” he said, referring to the Immigration Act of 1990 that raised the cap on legal migration. “For many migrants [now], there is simply no way to legally immigrate to the United States. And even for people who do have a path to get a visa to the United States, that path is often so expensive and time consuming that it is not practically possible.” Eduardo Beckett, an El Paso-based immigration attorney who specializes in asylum cases, said Republicans have had success in crafting an anti-immigrant message while Democrats can’t or won’t push back on the policy front. “The right-wing, the Trump [supporters], the anti-immigrants are loud and more in the open, they don’t hold back, but in reality, it’s the whole system,” he said. Beckett specifically said that Title 42, a Trump-era, public health policy that allows federal border officials to immediately expel migrants at the United States southern border, likely increased the migrants’ sense of desperation. The policy has been in place since March 2020 and the Biden administration, despite an outcry from immigrant rights groups, kept it in place until earlier this year. (The policy is still in effect due to a court order issued last month.) “Title 42 should have ended right away, Biden dragged his feet,” he said. “So he’s to blame for that. But this has been going on for years, all the way back to the Clinton administration. I think the system is working exactly as it’s supposed to be. Less people are getting in the legal way.” That leads more people to turn to criminals and smugglers for a chance at entering the country, Beckett added. “Things need to change. There needs to be a humane way for people to apply, to come here whether it’s for asylum or whether it’s to work as an agricultural worker. Because the system is creating death, right now. At the border and everywhere around the world.” Monday’s fatal smuggling attempts came as the number of migrants encountered by U.S. Border Patrol agents at the southern border continues to climb to near-record levels. There were about 239,400 encounters between federal agents and migrants at the southwest border in May, a 2% increase compared to April, according to Customs and Border Protection. Texas continues to see the highest number of apprehensions, especially in the Rio Grande Valley, where there have been more than 333,000 encounters since the beginning of the federal government’s fiscal year in October, according to CBP statistics. That’s followed by the Del Rio Sector, where there have been more than 280,600 in the same time frame. |