Congressional Democrats are triggered by Joe Biden’s planned executive order to alter asylum claims for migrants who enter U.S. illegally, with some saying it won’t work.
President Joe Biden is expected to announce Tuesday a new executive action to limit the number of illegal migrants who can claim asylum once a threshold of unlawful crossers has been reached.
The White House and some lawmakers have said it would help him ‘shut down the border,’ but that is far from true critics say.
The order will enable the president to revoke illegal immigrants’ ability to claim asylum, which generally kicks-off a years-long court process.
Now, even Democrats are admitting that the expected plan to crack down on illegal immigration, months before an election, has major flaws.
‘So it’s not terribly likely that anything Biden is talking about doing can work without additional resources,’ Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., one of the architects of this year’s failed bipartisan border bill said.
‘Republicans are unwilling to provide the resources to fix the problem because they don’t want to fix the problem,’ he added, shifting the blame to the GOP.
‘I think what we built would have worked in bringing order along the border in part because it was paired with some pretty significant reforms to the sound system and a massive increase in resources.’
Murphy claims that because Biden’s plan does not include additional resources to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that the enforcement of such an action would be hampered.
Beyond the question of how will this order be enforced – the Democrat said he does not expect Biden’s plan to be legal.
‘I doubt that this is going to pass judicial muster,’ Murphy said. ‘It’s a pretty extraordinary exercise of executive power.’
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., lamented that Congress failed the president, forcing him to take action.
‘Joe Biden has made clear that his number one choice is for Congress to act,’ she told DailyMail.com. ‘Congress’s failings have forced Joe Biden into this move.’
‘He needs better tools. Congress has failed to do what it needs to do, both to give us border security and create a pathway to citizenship for the people who are here.’
Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., said in a statement: ‘By reviving Trump’s asylum ban, President Biden has undermined American values and abandoned our nation’s obligations to provide people fleeing persecution, violence, and authoritarianism with an opportunity to seek refuge in the U.S.’
Over in the House, Democrats also opposed Biden’s plan.
‘I’m concerned that this is just the enforcement-only side of the strategy,’ Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., told DailyMail.com.
‘The bottom line is House Democrats believe we can and should secure our border while opening up more legal pathways.’
The Californian said Biden should look to bolster temporary protected immigration statuses for those who cross into the U.S. illegally.
‘Those are things that we can do and the Biden administration should be looking at,’ Aguilar continued.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., wrote in a statement: ‘It is extremely disappointing to see the Biden administration severely restricting access to asylum.’
‘This attempt to shut down the border to asylum seekers uses the same section of U.S. immigration laws that convicted felon Donald Trump used to implement the Muslim Ban and in attempts to cut off all access to asylum.’
‘While there are some differences from Trump’s actions, the reality is that this utilizes the same failed enforcement-only approach, penalizes asylum seekers, and furthers a false narrative that these actions will ‘fix’ the border,’ Jayapal continued.
Republicans have also bashed the plan, calling it an election year maneuver to give Biden the facade of being tough on immigration.
‘Our borders have been left vulnerable and the safety of our citizens compromised. And here we stand just five months before this critical election with Joe Biden and the Democrats grasping for a political lifeline,’ Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., said at a Tuesday Senate GOP press event to bash the Biden plan.
‘Their recent announcement is nothing more than a desperate ploy to distract from their failures,’ he added.
Sen. Blackburn, R-Tenn., expressed the same sentiments at the event.
‘Human trafficking, the sex trafficking, the numbers are adding up and here you go with an election year political gimmick to try to push this issue aside so that [Biden] can go to a debate and say, ‘Well, I did something.”
An energized Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas., said at the presser that Biden and Democrat lawmakers have presided over ‘a criminal invasion of the United States’ by allowing over 10 million migrants to enter the U.S. since the president took office.
He alleged that Biden ‘deliberately broke the system’ and now in an election year the president is trying to fix it.
‘On day one of his presidency, Joe Biden rolled into the White House. He got into the Oval, and he dismantled everything that President Trump had in place that kept a lid on these illegal border crossings,’ Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, said.
‘So now here we are years later, and it has taken 10 million illegal border crossings for President Biden to step up and acknowledge that there is a crisis at the border and you know what, folks? It’s his own making.’
After the event concluded Ernst was heard whispering into a live microphone.
‘Bottom line, never trust a man whose uncle was eaten by cannibals,’ an apparent jab at Biden for claiming that his uncle who died in WWII was eaten by people in Papa New Guinea.