In a rare bit of intraparty blowback to President Joe Biden’s immigration schemes, a Democratic congressman is denouncing the administration’s liberal, open-border policies as “catastrophic.”
Appearing on CNN on Monday, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, whose district runs south from San Antonio to the border west of Brownsville, noted, “We’re in the middle of a pandemic, but for thousands of people to be reaching our border in the middle of a pandemic in a disorderly fashion would be catastrophic to my district.”
Continuing, Vicente Gonzalez said more than 3,000 of his constituents have died from COVID-19 and more than 1,000 Border Patrol officers and 500 Customs agents, as well as other front-line workers, have not been vaccinated, yet they are dealing with this population as they’re coming.
“We need to have a humane, compassionate way for people to ask for asylum in their home countries or their neighboring countries,” he said, according to an account of the interview by the Epoch Times. “And if they get the document, they can get on a plane for $400 and fly in. I think this policy forces them to make a 2,000-mile walk that is very dangerous, and they’re getting raped and pillaged along the way.”
Gonzalez, in near-Trumpian fashion, has been a proponent of a policy that would make asylum-seekers to file their claims at embassies or consulates in their home county – which contrasts with the Biden approach that allows them to make such appeals here in the U.S.
“We need to have a policy in place to prevent children and adults from making this 2,000-mile walk to our border. And when we send the wrong message to Central America – that if you make it to our southern border, you’re going to be processed and released – you’re going to, you could pretty much assure that you’re going to have tens of thousands of people coming up to make this very dangerous trek,” he told CNN.
“We need to find a safer solution to deal with asylum seekers,” Gonzalez added.
“I can assure you it won’t be long before we have tens of thousands of people showing up to our border, and it will be catastrophic for our party, for our country, for my region, for my district,” the congressman argued.
Meanwhile, on Monday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas rejected the idea of a border crisis.
During a briefing with White House correspondents, according to CNSNews.com, a reporter noted to Mayorkas that the former DHS secretary under President Barack Obama said 1,000 illegal border crossings a day amounts to a crisis. Yet now, the Border Patrol reports 3,000 to 4,000 crossings each day.
“How is this not a crisis?” Mayorkas was asked.
“We are challenged at the border. The men and women of the Department of Homeland Security are meeting that challenge,” Mayorkas replied.
“It is a stressful challenge, and we are — that is why quite frankly we are working as hard as we are, not only in addressing the urgency of the challenge but also in building the capacity to manage it and to meet our humanitarian aspirations and execution of the president’s vision.”