This past week, Senators Chuck Schumer and James Lankford proposed their idea of a “border deal” that should really be described as an “illegal immigrant deal.” This proposed deal includes providing incompetent illegal aliens with legal counsel on the American taxpayers’ dime, allows 5,000 immigrants per day into the United States, and increases green cards by 50,000 per year. While I believe our immigration system needs improvement, that cannot be addressed until we first shut down the southern border completely and manage the millions of illegal immigrants in our country.
House Republicans already passed H.R. 2, The Secure the Border Act, which is the strongest border bill in history. If the Senate was serious about addressing the crisis at our border, they would have passed H.R. 2 months ago. We have got to get construction of the border wall back up and running and equip our border patrol agents with what they need to combat this crisis, and that is exactly what H.R. 2 does.
Not to mention, the Fiscal Year 2024 Homeland Security Appropriations bill that I proudly helped pass out of committee and on to the House floor does a lot to secure our border and fix this crisis. The FY24 Homeland Security Appropriations bill allocates $2.1 billion to finish Trump’s border wall and $496 million for 22,000 new border patrol agents, all while cutting wasteful government spending.
We’ve got to get control of this crisis at the border. The numbers don’t lie – what’s going on at our southern border is a national security issue. In the past three years, there have been 8 million illegal crossings nationwide and over 6.7 million encounters at our southern border, turning every community into a border community. To put this in perspective, that’s more people than the population of the entire state of Alabama. The bottom line is the number of illegal crossings at the southern border has risen at a faster rate under President Biden than at any time in recent history, so it’s way past time for this Administration and my colleagues across the aisle to get serious about finally fixing this crisis.