We had low expectations when the slim Republican House majority took 15 votes before they could settle on a speaker, and so far they have demonstrated they have no plans for making life better for working families, as they seek to govern by publicity stunts. The Border “Debate” is a case in point.
New House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in February took a convoy that included more than a dozen Republican Congress members to the border between Arizona and Mexico near Yuma to bring attention to the hordes of aliens they claim seek to invade the US.
“As they rumbled along the entry port of San Luis, a dam along the Colorado River and more desolate sections of the U.S. border between Arizona and Mexico, though, their search came up empty,” a Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter on the scene described. “Hours later, immigration officials would spot a group crossing north, but it was long after Congress members had retired for the night.”
No Democrats participated in what ranking committee Democrat Jerry Nadler called a “stunt hearing,” though he did say some Democrats from the committee would go to the border in March to “hear from the community and government officials on the ground.”
The Judiciary “field hearing” was the third trip to the border by House Republicans, as Barely Speaker Kevin McCarthy had already traveled there to score points, as had members of the Energy and Conference Committee, Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos.com.
The Homeland Security Committee had what they called a “border bootcamp” for Republican freshmen members, and the Oversight Committee has plans to go in the near future, too. “That’s one way to stop illegal crossings: Just keep sending down convoys of GOP representatives to play border patrol,” McCarter noted.
But all that travel adds up, she noted. Jordan’s Judiciary Committee alone has requested $262,400 for travel this session. In 2022, with Democrats in charge, the committee spent $7,986.
Republicans complain the border is open and refugees keep showing up — but those “open border” claims are heard in Central and South America as an invitation. And those refugees are disappointed when they get to the border and find the Republicans lied.
In fact, federal agents along the southern border stopped migrants over 2.3 million times, a record high, in fiscal year 2022. And the number of migrants apprehended by the Border Patrol after illegally crossing the southern border dropped by roughly 40% in January, when the Biden administration announced a revamped strategy to discourage unlawful crossings.
In early January, the administration announced it would use a pandemic-related authority known as Title 42 to swiftly expel Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Venezuelans to Mexico without allowing them to seek asylum if they attempted to cross into the US without legal permission, CBS News reported.
Facts also undermine Republican claims that Biden’s lax attention to the border is responsible for the increase in fentanyl deaths in the US. In fact, Customs and Border Patrol are seizing record amounts of fentanyl at the border, and most mugglers are US citizens.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, from 2019-2021, fentanyl seizures at ports of entry nationwide quadrupled to 14,700 pounds as the US government’s ban on most legal cross-border traffic amid the public health emergency prompted narcotics traffickers to move the easier-to-conceal synthetic opioid, fentanyl.
In fiscal year 2022, 84% of the 14,104 pounds of fentanyl seized along the Mexican border were seized at ports of entry.
The Border Patrol seized 2,200 pounds of fentanyl, or 16% of all fentanyl seized along the southern border, in fiscal year 2022. And many of those seizures occurred at interior checkpoints, where Border Patrol agents screen commercial and passenger vehicles.
When it comes to actual border policy, rather than publicity and preening, Republicans have nothing. Instead, they’ve got an interparty fight, as Gabe Ortiz reported at Daily Kos Feb. 20. Their first go at an immigration bill “was so extreme it derailed itself, after so-called moderates refused to sign on.”
One of the “moderates,” US Rep. Tony Gonzales of San Antonio, condemned fellow Texas US Rep. Chip Roy’s bill gutting US asylum rules early on as “not Christian” and “very anti-American.” Gonzales added in a tweet, “Anyone who thinks a 3 page anti-immigration bill with 0% chance of getting signed into law is going to solve the border crisis should be buying beach front property in AZ.”
Talk like that, and a few votes that strayed from the party line, got Gonzales censured by the Republican Party of Texas, whose executive committee voted 57-5 March 3 to cite him for “lack of fidelity to Republican principles and priorities,” such as his vote for the modest gun bill that passed last year after the Uvalde school shooting in his district, as well as a bill codifying protections for same-sex marriage, and against the House Republicans’ rules package. He is in his second term representing the predominantly Hispanic West Texas district and the censure allows the party, which is otherwise required to remain neutral in intraparty contests, to support a challenger in Gonzales’ next primary. Two days later, Julie Clark, chairwoman of the Medina County GOP, where the censure resolution originated, announced she would challenge him, calling Gonzales “a real RINO!”
The GOP move against Gonzales might signal the growing Latino electorate in Texas to reconsider their recent move toward the party whose most recent president repeatedly cast slurs on Mexican and other dark-skinned immigrants. Donald Trump may have put a target on their back for armed White supremacists who don’t see much difference between illegal immigrants and brown-skinned US citizens.
Trump started his campaign in 2015 saying Mexicans were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” At rallies before the 2018 elections, Trump repeatedly warned that America was under attack by immigrants heading for the border. “You look at what is marching up, that is an invasion!” he declared at one rally.
Nine months later, on Aug. 3, 2019, a 21-year-old White man from a Dallas suburb opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle in a Walmart in El Paso, killing 23 people and injuring 22 more, after writing a manifesto railing against immigration and announcing that “this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” that is part of a “great replacement” of White people by people of color. Nearly all the victims had Latino last names, but many were US citizens. The shooter pleaded guilty in federal court to 90 crimes in connection with the massacre.
Texas Republican leaders deny Trump inspired the El Paso massacre or other attacks against Latinos, but Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott has the party’s support in his figurative war on immigrants, as he has sent the National Guard to support the Border Patrol, at a cost to Texas of more than $4 billion over the past two years. That includes $163 million for a border wall and $40 million to bus migrants north to Democrat-led cities. Meanwhile, Texas businesses complain they can’t find workers and Republican legislators are considering state tax credits to encourage more native births. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2023
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