A senior Republican senator on Tuesday said Congress is to blame for the continued surge of migrants arriving at the southern border each month and for the beleaguered state that border officials are in as they try to process families, unaccompanied children, and single adults.
“We have been AWOL, and that’s shameful,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration, said during a hearing on the issue Tuesday.
“There’s absolutely no justification whatsoever for Congress to sit on the sidelines and watch as this crisis continues to unfold,” said Cornyn. “It’s just getting worse and worse as Congress sits on its hands and does absolutely nothing to give you the tools you need in order to stop this crisis and to address it. And that’s shameful.”
Cornyn’s home state of Texas, out of the four southern border states, has seen the largest number of people illegally crossing into the U.S. He claimed Democrats are not willing to support Republican proposals to deal with migration because they believe “we ought not to detain people — we ought to wave them through.”
House Homeland Security Ranking Member Mike Rogers, R-Ala., berated Democrats Tuesday for blocking for a third time a supplemental funding bill that included $4.5 billion for DHS.
“It would have replenished critical funds needed to feed and shelter migrant families and unaccompanied children, provide urgent medical care and transportation services, and pay the growing costs of overtime for the men and women of DHS working on the front lines of this crisis,” Rogers said in a House floor speech. “Democrats need to stop denying the facts and blaming the president for this crisis. The time has come to face reality and work with the president and Republicans in Congress to immediately resolve this humanitarian crisis.”
Other GOP bills, including Sen. Lindsey Graham’s Secure and Protect Act, as well as a credible fear reform bill by Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., have not made any progress advancing through Congress.
During testimony before the Senate subcommittee Tuesday, acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan said the department would support any legislation that included solutions to family detention space shortages, the repatriation of unaccompanied minor children, the release of unaccompanied minors into the U.S., changing credible fear standards, and increasing ways Central Americans can seek refuge “close to home or in a bordering country.”
