The only Republican congressman whose district lies on the southern border called for the United States to launch a Marshall Plan to address root causes of wide-scale migration from Central America.
Outgoing Rep. Will Hurd on Monday said the Trump administration is focused on short-term actions to lower the number of migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border but must address the reasons that 977,000 people traveled to the southern border during fiscal 2019.
“There needs to be a Marshall Plan for the Northern Triangle where we array all government resources — OPEC, USAID, State Department, military, DOJ — against this problem,” Hurd said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “Where is the Organization of the American States? Where is the International Development Bank? This is not just a problem for the U.S. and Mexico. This is a problem for the entire Western Hemisphere, so we need to get the entire Western Hemisphere involved.”
Congress passed the Marshall Plan, or European Recovery Program, in 1948 to provide $12 billion to help Western Europe rebuild after World War II.
The Trump administration slashed foreign aid to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras earlier this year. The three countries make up Central America’s “Northern Triangle” region and last year were responsible for more citizens than any other country crossing into the U.S. illegally and claiming asylum at a U.S. border crossing. In October, the Trump administration announced it was reinstating $125 million in foreign aid. Hurd said the government needs to step up its response and bring in more international partners.
“The root causes of the pressures being put on our border and the humanitarian crisis that we have seen in the last couple months is violence, lack of economic opportunity, and extreme poverty in the Northern Triangle. We have to address those problems there, and it takes a fraction — it’s a fraction of the cost to solve the problem there before it actually gets to our border,” Hurd said.
Hurd, a former CIA officer who is leaving office at the end of his third term, said human smuggling and drug trafficking organizations should be deemed a “national intelligence priority” where the U.S. and other nations acquire and share information to dismantle operations in countries south of the border, where they originate.
He said Border Patrol agents in El Paso knew the license plates of buses that would bring migrants to the Mexico side of the border and drop them off so they could enter the U.S., but they did not use or pass on that information to Mexican counterparts.
“Why are we not going and working with our partners to dismantle that infrastructure that is being used to move people over here?” Hurd said. “The amount of data that we should be collecting on the drug trafficking organizations is high, and we should be using all our tools.”
Hurd did not call for the deployment of special forces, but he said they could be used if countries where forces are sent are willing to accept them.
He said the Department of Homeland Security should “streamline” the immigration application process, including asylum-seekers’ applications from their countries of origin. “In this day and age, we should be able to have an immigration system that’s designed on market forces and market demand and be able to do,” he said.
[Also read: Will Hurd warns of demographic dangers for GOP if party doesn’t broaden base of support]
