President Biden Should Not Make Border Crisis Even Worse
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered the following remarks today on the Senate floor regarding the crisis at the southern border:
“The Biden Administration is on track for another record-shattering year on our southern border — in all the wrong ways.
“The Department of Homeland Security is reportedly preparing for up to 18,000 attempted border crossings per day.
“President Biden’s border crisis is a symptom of the modern Democratic Party’s inability to support any remotely reasonable policy of border enforcement.
“Now, thus far, the Biden Administration has kept the chaos somewhat in check by leaning on emergency authorities that are specific to the COVID pandemic.
“To be clear, even with these Title 42 authorities in place, our border’s still been in crisis. Last month was the worst February in more than 20 years. We just saw the worst 12-month period for illegal crossings since at least 1960.
“This is with Title 42 in place. Just imagine if President Biden kills it.
“But the open-borders far left doesn’t like Title 42. So now, according to public reports, the Biden Administration is preparing to cave to the radicals, end Title 42, and effectively throw our borders wide open.
“Ending Title 42 without any real border security plan in place would spark a humanitarian and security crisis like we’ve never seen.
“But the far left doesn’t care. Open borders are their objective.
“So at the very same time that Washington Democrats are pushing for more federal spending on the pandemic, they want to declare the pandemic is finished at our southern border. It plainly does not add up.
“Throwing the floodgates open for an historic spring and summer of illegal immigration would be an unforced error of historic proportions. It would be right up there with this Administration’s $2 trillion in inflationary spending and their botched retreat from Afghanistan.
“But this goes deeper than just Title 42 and COVID.
“The fundamental point is this: Today’s Democrats need the pretext of the pandemic to justify having national borders at all. The left feels they need the pretext of COVID to have any border enforcement at all.
“It is mind-boggling.
“Republicans and the American people reject this false choice between permanent COVID versus open borders. We can’t only be a sovereign nation during pandemics! Americans deserve secure borders all the time.
“Functional open borders have pervaded the Biden agenda at every level.
“The President chose a Supreme Court nominee, Judge Jackson, who’s displayed a major streak of judicial activism on illegal immigration.
“In 2019, the Judge sided with left-wing activists and overlooked plain statutory language that gave DHS ‘sole and unreviewable discretion’ over speedy removal of illegal immigrants.
“Judge Jackson brushed aside the plain text of the law to reach the policy outcome she wanted. And she went even further. She issued a nationwide injunction to impose her radical policy view on the entire country.
“This was a blatant case of judicial activism. The ruling read like it belonged on the opinion pages of the Washington Post.
“Even the very liberal D.C. Circuit completely disagreed and overturned Judge Jackson, with an Obama appointee writing the opinion.
“It should not be this hard for an Administration to understand that a nation needs borders.
“I strongly urge the President to keep Title 42 in place and quickly produce an actual strategy to do his job and secure our border.”
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Related Issues: COVID-19, Supreme Court, Judicial Nominations, Immigration, Senate Democrats
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