Why won’t President Barack Obama and Congress work to end Obama’s push for amnesty at the border? Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) believes the reason stems back to the Bush era.
Cruz’s argument is that Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is the reason for the surge of child immigrants from Central America seeking illegal entry into the United States. More than 52,000 children have already arrived at the border since September, creating a crisis for the country.
Cruz is trying to gain support for legislation that would defund the program and would prevent it from being expanded. Conversely, Obama has proposed a $3.7 billion spending bill that would provide funding for authorities to take care of the immigrants already in the country.
Cruz appeared on Fox News Sunday to discuss his plan and why he believes it is a necessary part of any broader package approved by Congress to deal with the current crisis.
“What I want to do is solve the crisis. I agree with the president in one respect. We are seeing a humanitarian crisis. We’re seeing tens of thousands of young children coming in illegally, being brutalized, being mistreated by global transnational drug cartels. And the cause of this crisis is the promise of amnesty,” Cruz said.
“If you look at the history of this issue, in 2011 there were roughly 6,000 children apprehended coming in illegally. Then in 2012 President Obama unilaterally granted amnesty to some 800,000 people who were here illegally, who entered as children. The direct foreseeable consequence of that was the number of unaccompanied children skyrocketed so that this year the Obama administration is estimating 90,000 kids will come next year, 145,000. That’s up from just 6,000 three years ago.”
Host Chris Wallace played devil’s advocate and asked if it isn’t worse to stall any bill rather than just passing something. Cruz pushed back and said that if the bill doesn’t stem the flood of immigrants in the future, there is no point to the legislation.
“I don’t want to block action. What I want to do is have action that fixes the problem. If we pass a bill, let’s take President Obama’s proposed bill $3.7 billion. It does nothing to solve the problem,” Cruz said.
“You took that — and they’ve indicated they are willing to consider also adding a change to the 2008 law, the Wilbur Force law and to enforce the idea that all of these unaccompanied children would get a hearing in seven days. Why isn’t that enough?” Wallace replied.
“But Chris, that wouldn’t solve the problem. You know, one of the things the Obama administration is trying very hard to do is blame this crisis on the 2008 law. It’s not complicated why. There’s nothing the Obama administration enjoys more than blaming problems on President George W. Bush. And since the ’08 law was signed by Bush they can blame it all on him,” Cruz continued. “The problem with that theory is when the law was passed in ’08 we didn’t see the number of children coming in skyrocket. It didn’t skyrocket in ’09, it didn’t skyrocket in ’10, it didn’t skyrocket in ’11. The cause of this crisis isn’t the ’08 law. The cause of the crisis was in June of 2012, President Obama’s granting amnesty.”
