‘As if damaging inflation, soaring costs, lower real wages, and more debt were not punishment enough for the American people, Democrats also want to stuff a massive amnesty plan into their tax-and-spend spree. It’s like they have systematically identified the worst idea for American families on every issue and set about rolling them into one huge, reckless proposal.’
U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered the following remarks Thursday, July 22, 2021 on the Senate floor regarding the border crisis:
“With COVID-19 cases ticking up across our nation, with some bureaucrats and elected leaders talking about re-imposing various measures on the American people, the Biden Administration continues to let illegal immigrants pour across our southern border. And reportedly they are considering loosening our border security even more.
“Remember, when the Biden campaign’s rhetoric and then the Biden Administration’s early actions led to a rush on the border, they tried to waive it off as a seasonal springtime surge.
“But that wasn’t true. The numbers just keep climbing. Customs and Border Protection had more encounters on the southern border in June than they had in May.
“Nearly 190,000 encounters last month alone. The highest number in 21 years.
“Law enforcement is coming across huge groups of hundreds of individuals.
“With almost three months still remaining in fiscal year 2021, CBP has already encountered more illegal immigrants than it did in the entirety of fiscal 2019, before COVID. We’ve exceeded that total with almost three months to go.
“The Biden Administration claims they’re addressing the crisis by simply speeding up the rate at which they get migrants out of custody, out of border facilities. As if simply reducing the headcount was the goal. Of course that’s no solution at all if the individuals are simply being released into the interior of the country.
“Orderly, legal immigration is part of the heart of the United States of America and always has been. But it simply is not a universal human right for everybody in the Western hemisphere who would like a better job to break our rules and turn up at the border. No country in the world could govern itself that way.
“In fact, this ongoing crisis is supremely unfair and uncompassionate to the men, women, and children that it continues to entice into the scorching desert sun.
“Border Patrol agents are having to double as humanitarian workers and EMTs. They rescue people who get lost. Who are at risk of drowning. Who have been simply abandoned by smugglers or traffickers.
“And amid all this, in the thick of this crisis, the Biden Administration has spent weeks flirting with ending its Title 42 authority, declaring the COVID emergency to be finished at our southern border, and letting even more people stream across.
“COVID is already on the rise again. The border is already in crisis. And the President and his team want to end the emergency safeguards at our border?
“Re-impose COVID precautions on the American people but end the COVID emergency for illegal immigrants? How does that make any sense?
“Meanwhile, our Democratic friends here on Capitol Hill say they want to push a massive amnesty plan into the reckless taxing and spending spree they want to pass later this year on a party-line vote.
“As if damaging inflation, soaring costs, lower real wages, and more debt were not punishment enough for the American people, Democrats also want to stuff a massive amnesty plan into their tax-and-spend spree.
“It’s like they have systematically identified the worst idea for American families on every issue and set about rolling them into one huge, reckless proposal.”
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