Texans’ border bill a ‘first step’ in reforms
Measure to address migrant surge by increasing processing capacity
WASHINGTON — A trio of Texans in Congress is proposing a bipartisan bill they say will help handle the influx of migrants arriving at the southern border — a move U.S. Sen. John Cornyn on Thursday described as a “first step” toward broader immigration reform that has eluded lawmakers for years.
“This is, we think, the most urgent need,” Cornyn said. “So that’s why we’re starting with this bill.”
The legislation, which Cornyn is pushing in the Senate with U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat, would speed adjudication of asylum claims while building new processing centers to address overcrowding in border facilities. U.S. Reps. Henry Cuellar, a Laredo Democrat, and Tony Gonzales, a San Antonio Republican, are pushing a companion bill in the House.
It is the first bipartisan and bicameral attempt to address the latest surge in migrants arriving at the southern border, which has emerged as the first major political dilemma of Joe Biden’s presidency.
The Border Patrol encountered more migrants at the southern border in March than it had in two decades as the number of unaccompanied children and families seeking refuge in the United States continues to grow. The number of unaccompanied children roughly doubled from February, and Border Patrol reported a record 18,890 encounters with those minors in March.
Republicans have said it’s a “crisis” of Biden’s creation, blaming the uptick on his shift away from some of the Trump administration’s strictest immigration policies.
Biden has said he inherited a mess of an immigration system and has noted that encounters have been on the rise since last April, though the peaks they have now reached have left the president’s administration scrambling to stand up shelters for unaccompanied children while social workers search for sponsors in the U.S. to care for them.
The bill filed Thursday, titled the Bipartisan Border Solutions Act, is an effort to move beyond those partisan battles, the lawmakers said.
“We know this crisis at the border is not a Democrat or Republican problem. It’s not a new prob
lem,” Sinema said. “It’s an American problem, and it’s one we’ve been dealing with in our border states for decades.”
“Right now the country is divided in many ways, but this is an area that not one person, not one party can solve alone — we all have to come together,” Gonzales said. “This bill is at the heart of what does that.”
The bill would create at least four regional processing centers in high-traffic Border Patrol sectors to ease overcrowding in U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities, where small children packed into holding rooms have been sleeping on mats on the floor.
Migrants would be able to make asylum claims at those processing centers and the legislation would create a prioritized docket of those cases, putting unaccompanied children at the front of the line.
The bill would also add 150 new immigration judges, 300 asylum officers and other staff to speed the processing of those claims. And it would seek to improve legal orientation and translation services at those centers.
As of Wednesday, there were 20,544 unaccompanied children in Health and Human Services facilities across the country, where officials with the Office of Refugee Resettlement were working to find sponsors to care for them in the U.S.
Another 2,718 unaccompanied minors were still in Border Patrol facilities.
“We’ve got to have a sense of urgency,” Cuellar said. “We can either just wait and just let the numbers just keep coming, or do we get a sense of urgency and do something? We’ve got to try something.”
It’s unclear how far the legislation may go, however, as immigration has long been an issue that Congress has struggled to address.
Biden and Democrats are pushing a major immigration overhaul that would offer a pathway to citizenship to up to 1.7 million Texans who are in the country without legal authorization. That bill would also provide $4 billion in aid for the Central American nations to address the conditions that migrants are fleeing.
Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of senators, including Cornyn and Sinema, this week restarted meetings on broader immigration reform.
U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who was in those meetings, told reporters Thursday that “there's some things we could do, if we could just stop the flow and regain control.”
“I think we would be well advised to try to do this now and then build from there,” Cornyn said. “We all recognize we need to do more. This is just a start.”