Blunt takes Biden Administration to task over border crisis

Yesterday, Missouri U.S. Senator Roy Blunt delivered floor remarks criticizing the Biden administration for its failure to secure the southern border. As Blunt noted, illegal border crossings reached a record level in 2021, topping 2 million encounters, after President Biden abandoned effective border security policies put in place under the Trump administration. Blunt specifically cited the Biden administration’s decision to end the “Remain in Mexico” policy and halt the construction of physical barriers along the border.

Read or watch his remarks below:

“The ability to secure your border, to follow my good friend from Ohio, the ability to secure your border is actually one of the fundamental responsibilities of a legitimate government. Even former President Obama, within the last few months, has looked at what was happening at the border, and I believe the word he used was, ‘unsustainable.’

“We cannot continue to let this happen. It’s a border crisis, whether the administration is willing to call it a border crisis or not. Drugs coming across. I know my friend from Tennessee is going to talk about that as the senator from Ohio did.

“More than 2 million people were apprehended trying to cross the border last year. Of that number, more than 171,000 were unaccompanied children. The year before had been 37,000 – 2020. It was 37,000 people, should have been warning sign.

“37,000 children is bad enough, let alone 171,000 – almost four times the number that came the year before. We need to ask ourselves, what are we doing to encourage that happening?

“Why would parents let their children come, send their children? Or why would children come on their own to the border at the numbers of 171,000? Obviously, we don’t know exactly how many people actually entered the country illegally. So if 2 million people were apprehended entering the country, some of them may have been making repeat efforts to come into the country.

“But there’s no real evidence that very many people get sent back. But let’s assume some do. So some of the apprehended people may have been multiple offenders, if you will, of trying to violate our law by coming in. I think it’s more reasonable to believe that more people weren’t apprehended than were apprehended multiple times. So we have a huge problem here.

“The policies that have already been discussed: why would the number – just over 2,035,000 last year – why would that number be 272% greater than the year before? Things happening in the countries they come from aren’t different substantially than they were the year before. Weather is not in crisis in any way different than it was the year before.

“So let’s look at day one of the Biden administration where one of the first decisions is, ‘we’re going to stop building the barrier that’s in process of being built.’ Not ‘we’re going to debate whether we should do more of it or not.’ We’re going to stop building the barrier that Congress has appropriated the money for, that the equipment has been bought for, that the necessary metal and fencing and other things have been bought for, and they’re delivered. After we get that up, let’s decide if we need to do more.

“You know, I’ve never been in the view that every inch of the border needs to have a barrier. But I’ve always been in the view that a barrier or a fence or a wall, whatever you want to call it, has to be helpful, particularly if it has the technology that was going into this fence.

“So, you know, just watching that great investment that the American people made sit there and not completed is a problem. Some wall and fence had been torn down already. So the new wall and fence could be put back up. We have areas that don’t have the kind of fence they had five years ago or 10 years ago or under the Clinton administration because we decided, ‘no, we’re just going to stop doing what the Congress has already provided money and the authority to do.’

“And then the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy, which, frankly, I thought was one of the most amazing things that our government got the government of Mexico to agree to. It was a major step on their part to help us not only secure our border, but discourage people from needlessly coming all the way through Mexico.

“You know, most of our immigrants are not Mexican immigrants anymore. They’re Central American immigrants. They’re the immigrants that others have talked about today from all over the world, but they come through Mexico. And Mexico doesn’t like that either.

“So why would ‘Remain in Mexico’ work? ‘Remain in Mexico’ was working because people when they see that they’re not going to be let loose in the United States or delivered somewhere in the United States and told to come back 90 days or five years later, when they see that’s not going to happen and they talk to anybody who understands the law, nine out of 10 of them know that they have no chance for an asylum claim.

“And they’re in Mexico. It’s not that they have no chance for an asylum claim, and they have arrived and then taken somewhere in the United States, and told to return at a later date. It clearly just did not work. The ‘Remain in Mexico,’ we could have put more money there. In fact, we put quite a bit of money there but then walked away from the facilities that were just about to begin to serve the purpose in the way that the American people, the most generous people in the world, about people coming to our country, some of the, I think, the most liberal immigration laws in the world for legal immigration.

“We could have made an investment so that people could have safely and securely understood that you’re not going to be able to advance this asylum claim. Easiest thing in the world to do is show up at the border and say we’re claiming asylum. The United States government sends you somewhere in the United States to wait and come back later for a hearing.

“Now we see people, single adults, getting on planes in the middle of the night and being flown to other airports and getting off in the middle of the night. I’ve even heard, surely this can’t be really accurate, that you’re told to use your arrest papers as your identification to get on the plane.

“If we’ve come to the point where our border policy is, ‘use the arrest papers to get on the plane so wherever we take you, you are able to then work, be part of our society until somebody catches you and tells you, you can’t be part of our society,’ is a huge problem.

“The border is out of control. There is clearly a border crisis. I am a major supporter of legal immigration. I’m a major supporter of kids who were brought here by their parents illegally and have grown up in America, not gotten in trouble. I think they should be able to stay, and we should want them to stay.

“I am not a supporter of this blatant violation of the law and sending a message to the whole world, ‘here’s how you get done what you want to get done even though it’s against the laws of the United States to do what we are clearly helping you do.'”