Outraged that the Biden administration has wiped away four years of advances in securing the U.S.-Mexico border, GOP leaders said that they are making immigration a top issue.
House leaders, led by Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, said it is wrong for the Biden administration to be limiting school openings due to coronavirus concerns while putting out the welcome mat for illegal immigrants, some infected with COVID-19 and set to be sent to U.S. cities.
Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican as chairwoman of the House GOP Conference, ripped President Biden spokeswoman Jen Psaki’s comments that the migrant crisis on the border, prompted by the president’s new open-door policies, left her “heartbroken.”
At a press conference, Cheney said, “We are going to be very focused as a conference on what’s happening at the border, on working to make sure that, as the Biden administration refuses to open schools, they have instead decided to open the border and to let in thousands of people potentially who have got COVID. You’ve got children at the border that have been separated again from their parents, and being ‘heartbroken’ isn’t a policy.”
The crisis has been prompted by Biden’s reversal of most Trump immigration policies. It has prompted a new wave of illegal immigrants over the border, often into Border Patrol facilities and some wearing professionally printed T-shirts reading, “Biden Please Let Us In!”
As a result, in some cases, officials are having to resort to the same types of family divisions and detention tactics Biden and Democrats decried during the early days of the Trump administration before Trump used diplomatic pressure to slow the flow of illegal immigrants.
Less than two months into the new administration, Biden officials are declaring a crisis at the border. That should have been expected, said Cheney.
“When you say that you’re not going to enforce our immigration laws, when you say that you’re not going to build a border wall, it has consequences. We’re seeing the tragic consequences of that right now at the border,” she said.
