“They are using this horrific Senate bill as a way to be able to put the border debacle on Republican shoulders. “Democrats broke the border, and they need to fix it.”
As someone who has spent time along the 3,000-kilometre border that separates the United States and Mexico, I can tell you firsthand: the US immigration system is a mess, thanks to the failure of successive governments over many years.
From a national security perspective, authorities encountered more than 3.2 million people who crossed the border in the year ending Sept. 30 — far more than the 1.9 million recorded in 2021, Biden's first year in office. Some 169 immigrants have been named on a terrorism watch list, more than 35,000 criminal convictions have been made, and more than 12,000 kilograms of fentanyl have been seized.
Migrants walk north to the US border from Tapachula, Mexico.credit: AP
But from a humanitarian perspective, the vast majority of those crossing the border are not criminals or potential terrorists, but rather people hoping to apply for asylum after fleeing poverty, violence or authoritarian rule in their country.
They are people like Luis Valbuena and Maria Claudia, whom I met in El Paso, Texas, recently, after their two-and-a-half-month journey with their young daughter, largely on foot, from their home in Colombia.
The family had traveled through the jungles of Panama, down the fast-flowing rivers of Nicaragua, and past drug cartels in Mexico.
On the day I met them, they were camping outside an El Paso church, having been processed and released back into the community — a practice that limits the number of families placed in detention centers. They were working out what to do while they waited for their immigration hearing to seek asylum.
However, due to the court's extraordinary backlog and lack of resources in the United States, this hearing was not scheduled to take place until March 2027. With limited property and funds, what were they supposed to do until then?
And therein lies much of the problem. While many immigrants enter the United States in pursuit of the “Great American Dream,” the process of getting through the courts to validate their asylum claims can take years. For most of that period, they are not legally allowed to work, although many find “unauthorized” work anyway.
As the numbers continued to rise, many were sent to places like New York, Chicago, Denver and Washington, D.C. — “sanctuary cities” where every person in need of housing has a unique legal right to shelter. This too has become unsustainable.
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Which brings us back to the bastion of hypocrisy known as the US Congress.
If approved, the border deal that Trump and some Republicans now want to reject would require the border to be closed if encounters reach a daily average of 5,000 in a week or 8,500 in a single day. It would also speed up the asylum process for people with valid claims, and limit the use of parole to release immigrants to the United States.
The deal will also unlock funds for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan because that is how Biden submitted his supplemental funding request to Congress last year amid heightened global tensions.
It's not a perfect solution, but it is arguably the most important border bill agreed to by both parties in years. It's also an admission by Biden — who came into office temporarily halting all deportations, opposed the border wall and vowed to end the Trump administration's harsh practices — that this mess is partly of his own making.
If there was a bipartisan political will to fix it.
“It's not going to happen, and I'm going to fight it to the end,” Trump said at a rally in Nevada on Saturday.
He then went on to present his campaign plan to resolve the crisis: “the largest deportation program in the history of the United States.”
It's going to be a great election year.
