During a hearing this Wednesday of the House Committee on Homeland Security, ranking member Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) denounced the approach taken lately by Republicans to issues surrounding the southern border.
Republicans have run with the claim that President Joe Biden and top leaders in his administration are presiding over a crisis at that border — something that’s sometimes been characterized deceptively as an “invasion” and that some Republicans have reached the point of recently claiming has culminated in operational control at the southern border for foreign criminal groups. Those claims do not reflect reality in any meaningful sense, though they’re in articles of impeachment proposed against the president by Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.).
“Republicans are trying to advance their illegitimate impeachment agenda, even as the Biden administration and Secretary Mayorkas work to implement orderly and humane border policies,” Thompson said. “Given the hearing’s title, it’s apparently lost on Republicans that it was actually the Trump administration’s border policies that imposed devastating human costs, particularly on families and children.” Thompson subsequently discussed the family separations conducted under the Trump administration and that former president’s policy of forcing many asylum seekers into potentially seriously dangerous conditions in northern Mexico to await further progress in their cases in the United States.
“These were very real human costs, borne mostly by children, families, and the most vulnerable,” Thompson continued. Now, some Republicans seem more interested in capitalizing upon any suffering that is present. Consider the GOP officials who have sent immigrants to sometimes far-flung places in the U.S. without any clear establishment in association with the trips that those making the trek would arrive to the resources in place to meet their basic needs. And they’re also just lying. It is factually incorrect to characterize the Biden administration as somehow just ignoring key portions of the law around immigration, though Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) recently accused the president of implicit support for terrorism because of a supposedly lax approach to immigration and the border.
