Top homeland security officials from the Trump administration said that their successors in the Biden administration will see the border crisis worsen because they are only responding to the surge in illegal migration without stopping it.
“The current administration is not doing anything to prevent this,” said Mark Morgan, the former acting Customs and Border Protection commissioner, during a virtual briefing hosted by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank Tuesday morning. “They’re actually actively participating in encouraging it, incentivizing and facilitating. They’re not trying to stop the crisis. They’re just trying to get better at facilitating [it].”
HEARTBREAKING IMAGES OF ABANDONED CHILDREN AMPLIFY SENSE OF CRISIS AT BORDER
Former acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf compared President Joe Biden’s approach to soaring numbers of unaccompanied children, adults, and families arriving at the border to “trying to put a BandAid on a very deep cut.”
“We’re three months in, and we’ve already filled all our facilities. They’re renting facilities as fast as they can,” said Ken Cuccinelli, former senior official performing the duties of acting DHS deputy secretary.
CBP has opened one large influx facility in southeastern Texas to hold families and children after they come across the U.S.-Mexico border. Two weeks ago, a Texas congresswoman who toured the facility said it had 5,700 people on site despite its 250-person capacity. The Biden administration is not returning the majority of families to Mexico due to a Mexican law in the state of Tamaulipas that prevents people from being sent back south of the border, and single children who arrive from countries other than Mexico are not sent back.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for caring for children who show up without parents, has stood up more than a dozen emergency facilities, including one in the northern border state of Michigan, to hold the children while they search for sponsors in the United States to release them to. The response is one-sided, according to the three officials, who added that the federal agencies will soon be returning to Congress for emergency funding, which they said would not be the solution.
“Let’s stop treating this like a capacity issue,” said Wolf. “If you don’t have any enforcement, then you know the money and the resources needed are going to be nonstop. And so, Congress will be back at it again in just a few months.”
Cuccinelli said the White House announcement Monday that it was making progress in discussions with leaders from Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico about adding security at their borders was a positive step forward. But he said lawmakers’ consideration of legislation that would provide a pathway to citizenship to eligible illegal immigrants was a step in the wrong direction when Congress ought to be focused on preventing more illegal immigration.
“Typically, there’s been bipartisan agreement that we have to solve security issues before we move forward on other immigration steps, but that is not the case under this administration,” said Cuccinelli. “They’re attempting to jam amnesty through, and at the same time pushing through an election bill, H.R. 1, that will have the practical effect of registering hundreds of thousands and ultimately millions of folks who are crossing today and who have crossed in the past and are still here illegally, putting them on our voter rolls. … We see a human crisis on the border and humanitarian crisis on the border. They see a voter registration line.”
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H.R. 1, House Democrats’ election overhaul bill, would grant migrants eligibility to vote only if they qualified for a path to citizenship under specific programs and went through a yearslong process of gaining approval.
