House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and 12 other House Republicans are examining the situation at Texas’ southern border and will comment later Monday (March 15) in El Paso, Texas. They are making the move to provide first-hand evidence of a reversal of Biden‘s immigration policies.
McCarthy and other Republicans have been condemning Biden for the continued influx of immigrants at the southern border as a result of immigration policies enacted since Biden took office. After the visit, McCarthy and others are likely to re-emphasize this point. They have been calling for a solution to the “crisis” at the border, but the Biden Administration has refused to use that term to describe the influx of immigrants and the limited federal resources available to deal with the crisis.
McCarthy said the purpose of the trip was to “see first-hand information on the ground and then come back and offer solutions to make sure our borders are secure and that we can end this crisis that Biden has created.”
The members of Congress who joined McCarthy on the trip were John Katko, Chuck Fleischmann, Clay Higgins, Tony Gonzales, Michael Cloud, Yvette (Herrell), David Joyce, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, August Pfluger, John Rose and Maria Salazar.
At a press conference last Thursday (March 11), McCarthy told reporters in border communities that the influx of illegal immigrants has caused some of the worst harm.
“The facilities there are so overcrowded that the Border Patrol can only release migrants into the town center,” he said, quoting a mayor of a border town. “There are car chases almost every day now. Just (last) Sunday, they had a head-on collision.”
McCarthy added, “These migrants are sometimes armed. In the last two weeks, schools have had to be closed in border towns because armed migrants have come out. And there were also multiple officers shot in January. That happened right here in this community.”
House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) also spoke at that press conference. He said, “(The crisis) was created by President Biden, and he can fix it today, if he just changes the order back.”
Scalise also argued that Biden must realize the failure of his policies. He said, “Any good leader will look in the mirror, and if they make a mistake, they’ll admit it’s a mistake and then they’ll correct it. Because Biden himself can fix that right now. But the first step is to acknowledge that there is a crisis.”
In his first two months in office, Biden reversed a series of Trump-era immigration policies. He withdrew the Migrant Protection Protocols/MPP, also known as the “Stay in Mexico” policy, so that illegal immigrants could await trial on U.S. soil.
Earlier this month, a delegation of Biden’s senior administration officials also visited the border. The White House said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and domestic policy adviser Susan Rice were among the visitors. They went to a Border Patrol camp and a health and human services facility at the border.
But the White House action was publicly criticized by Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Calif.). He said the visit was inadequate because the White House delegation “didn’t talk to anybody, not even to the members of Congress there.
Despite opposition from many quarters, the Biden administration has stressed that they are following border laws to the letter and will not simply let anyone into the United States. White House Press Secretary Leonardo Psaki said last week, “Most people who come to the border will be turned away.”
However, the reality is that the number of Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) arrests of illegal immigrants spiked to more than 100,000 in February 2021 alone. So far, illegal immigration arrests in FY 2021 are 97 percent higher than in FY 2020, and 24 percent higher than in FY 2019, when the border crisis first erupted.
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