Biden's policies on illegal immigrants have led to a rush from Central America. The White House refuses to call the event a crisis, despite clear evidence that thousands of migrants, including many children and teens, are crossing the border in record numbers.
With the reversal of the Trump administration's 'Remain-in-Mexico' policy under the Migrant Protection Protocol program, the Biden Administration is now working to process as many as 25,000 asylum seekers who were previously required to wait in Mexico. The federal government currently has more than 14,000 migrant children in its custody.
Unbelievably, as Biden's border crisis continues, House Democrat Leaders, without even a hearing, brought a mass-amnesty bill to the floor that contains no enforcement provisions.
H.R. 6 - American Dream and Promise Act of 2021 would provide a pathway to citizenship for so-called Dreamers and to certain recipients or potential recipients of Temporary Protected Status and Deferred Enforced Departure, as well as children of certain nonimmigrant visa holders. Yet this legislation ignores the deteriorating situation and only provides an incentive for more aliens to illegally cross the border in hopes of eventually receiving similarly favorable treatment.
Our border patrol agents are overwhelmed, while more than 3,700 unaccompanied people were in Customs and Border Protection custody as of last week. There have been 100,000 encounters and arrests in the previous month.
Even worse, the bill's amnesty process would allow the Secretary of Homeland Security to waive inadmissibility grounds, including those pertaining to aliens inadmissible on health-related grounds (such as having a communicable disease of public health significance) and loosens the criminal grounds for inadmissibility. This means individuals who knowingly smuggled people into the United States or voted illegally in a federal, state or local election.
H.R. 6 allows certain criminals to receive waivers for misdemeanors and establishes a problematic standard for denying green cards to criminal gang members, so much so that the individual Secretary of DHS himself or herself would have to issue denials.
The other legislation introduced this week, H.R. 1603 - Farm Workforce Modernization Act, would grant amnesty to over one-million unlawful farmworkers and their dependents by creating a Certified Agricultural Worker (CAW) program that will also allow individuals who have been convicted of two crimes of moral turpitude to qualify under a waiver for CAW status. Moral turpitude's description in relevant case law includes "…conduct that shocks the public conscience" but includes simple crimes such as theft offenses and fraud, as well.
Regardless of any merits the bill may have to offer, this legislation is not only incredibly tone-deaf considering as we are facing a pandemic and a widespread lack of confidence in our elections, but it is also incredibly dangerous given the enormous surge of migrants at the border and ensuing chaos.
My vote: NO