The Biden administration’s sweeping abandonment of a commitment to enforcing U.S. immigration laws, including the execution of lawful deportations, failure to support effective state and local cooperation in enforcing such laws, failure to support the completion of border wall construction in needed areas of the U.S. southwestern border and failure to seek and secure legislative remedies to grave systemic weaknesses in the U.S. immigration and asylum system, make it impossible for the Texas Public Policy Foundation to support efforts to grant a pathway to U.S. citizenship to unauthorized immigrants in the country, as well as current beneficiaries of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programs.
“Since the outset of TPPF’s Right on Immigration campaign, we have been clear that any major congressional action on immigration, such as relief for the DACA population, must be preceded by safeguards that secure our southwestern border, including legislation to prevent the kind of massive abuse of the U.S. asylum system that precipitated the horrendous crisis we experienced on that border less than two years ago,” said John Hostettler, Vice President of Federal Affairs at TPPF. “It also needs to be pointed out that granting a pathway to U.S. citizenship goes well beyond the kind of provisional, renewable U.S. residency and work authorizations currently afforded to the DACA and TPS populations,” Hostettler added.
“The way we see it, border security – including superseding grave deficiencies such as the Flores Settlement Agreement and eliminating the disparate treatment of minors from contiguous and non-contiguous countries in the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 – is the essential foundation for a trustworthy and functional, as opposed to dysfunctional, U.S. immigration system,” said Hostettler.
The former six-term Indiana congressman and Chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims stated that these and other changes are necessary for securing the country’s southwestern border, including the enactment of congressional legislation superseding the Flores Settlement Agreement along with an amendment to the referenced Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act that would treat all foreign national unaccompanied minors equally.
To advance awareness of these issues and support for these goals, in 2019 TPPF launched its Right on Immigration initiative and spearheaded the formation of the Border Security Coalition in order to focus on “policies that secure the border and restore the rule of law as we fix and improve legal immigration to the United States of America.”