OPINION:
Calls for Congress to defund the Biden administration’s open-border operations and to enact real border security measures gained steam this week. With a week of funding left in the federal fiscal year, the House is considering attaching most of the Secure the Border Act to a continuing resolution package to fund the government.
After the bill passed the House in May, many had written it off as dead on arrival in the Senate. Yet the Senate nearly passed the legislation in June, with every present Republican voting in favor, aside from Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.
Now, Sen. Ted Cruz is leading 26 original Republican co-sponsors to introduce the Senate companion of the House bill.
Also called the Secure the Border Act, the Senate bill combines closing known loopholes that illegal aliens, cartels and the Biden administration exploit. It applies consequences for illegal immigration with previously successful policies; increases Customs and Border Protection resources for true border security and enforcement; and authorizes the defunding of the nongovernmental organization industrial complex that the Biden administration pays to receive, process, transport, shelter, counsel, and give social services to the millions of illegal aliens coming to the U.S.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has been violating the Immigration and Nationality Act by mass paroling tens of thousands of inadmissible aliens into the U.S. each month, based on nationality, providing them at least two years of “temporary status” and giving them immediate work authorization.
Congress intended immigration parole to be a rarely used humanitarian tool to temporarily bring an alien who lacks the time to get a visa into the U.S. for “urgent humanitarian reasons” or “significant public benefit.” The Senate bill would expressly narrow parole to end Mr. Mayorkas’ abuses.
The left has also built an illegal immigration system on the backs of unaccompanied alien children. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Unaccompanied Alien Child Protection Act became law in the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. The law introduced by the California Democrat inexplicably treats unaccompanied children from Mexico and Canada different than unaccompanied children from the rest of the world. It requires the former to be returned home and the latter to remain in the U.S. while providing them several immigration benefits.
This has predictably resulted in soaring numbers of unaccompanied children coming to the U.S. from noncontiguous countries. During the Biden administration alone, 400,000 such children have come to the U.S. after Mr. Mayorkas publicly stated multiple times he would not turn back unaccompanied alien children. Today’s unaccompanied children then become tomorrow’s “Dreamers” for whom the left demands green cards because they entered the U.S. as children, which the left perversely enticed.
President Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services recklessly turns these unaccompanied children over to illegal aliens and other unvetted “sponsors” and acknowledges losing at least 85,000 unaccompanied children.
The New York Times has reported on such children being forced into sex trafficking and put into dangerous child labor conditions that were outlawed nearly a century ago. The Senate bill would end the disparate treatment of unaccompanied children based on nationality and return them to their families.
A third aspect of our immigration law that Mr. Mayorkas has burned down is asylum. After encouraging the millions of illegal aliens coming to the U.S. to apply for asylum to give them unfettered access to America, declaring them all “asylum-seekers,” and claiming they are persecuted by global climate change, poverty and general violence (none of which are actual legal grounds for asylum), our asylum system is consumed by fraud and is unrecognizable from what was originally intended.
The Senate legislation would restore asylum integrity by requiring migrants to seek protection in the first safe country they enter rather than country-shop to get to the U.S., raising the “credible fear” standard that an alien at our border must meet to match the standard that an asylum applicant must meet.
This provision would also clarify the persecution eligibility ground of “membership in a particular social group,” which the left grossly abuses, to exclude climate change, domestic abuse and other conditions that have nothing to do with social groups or membership.
It’s obvious that the Biden administration’s claim that its so-called “awful pathways have reduced illegal immigration is erroneous. CBP agents are apprehending over 8,000 illegal aliens between the ports and thousands more at the ports each day. The chaos is visible at our border, and the pipeline continues all the way down to the Darien Gap in Panama, thanks to this administration.
Responsible senators need to uphold their oath of office and protect this country. The kind of policy tools contained in the Secure the Border Act can help us end this self-destruction. The Senate nearly passed the Secure the Border Act, including mandatory E-Verify, in June.
With current conditions along the border and Americans suffering from the volumes of people, drugs and costs, the need for the Senate to act couldn’t be more acute. Mr. Biden’s arson of America must end.
• Lora Ries is director of The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center.
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