TPPF Statement on Senate Border Bill

The Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) today issued the following statement on the so-called Senate Border Bill, H.R. 815, whose text was released late last night:

“This bill does nothing to secure our border, and if passed would achieve the incredible feat of making it even worse,” said Greg Sindelar, CEO of TPPF. “From empowering the most untrustworthy executives in the Biden regime to do even more damage to our country, to setting up funds for corrupt foreign regimes, to establishing a new and catastrophic border-crisis baseline, H.R. 815 manages to envision and enact as much harm to America as can be packed into three hundred seventy pages of legislation. It is bad for America, bad for Texas, and bad for the millions of human-trafficking victims at our border. We strongly oppose it.”

“The Senate’s border bill fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the border crisis, and therefore is unable to advance a solution,” said Carine Martinez, Director of TPPF’s Secure and Sovereign Frontier campaign. “What we have at our southern border is a crisis created by a Mexican state that cooperates openly with its own criminal cartels, trafficking fellow human beings by the millions — and by a Washington, D.C., that continually refuses to do its Constitutional duty. The solution isn’t in H.R. 815, which would make everything considerably worse. The solution is in directly addressing those two causes. We need to get tough with Mexico — and get tough with D.C. too.”

“If Washington, D.C., really wants to solve the border crisis, then Texans have a solution,” said Joshua Treviño, TPPF Chief of Intelligence and Research. “It doesn’t require a several-hundred page bill. Our solution is just five words: get out of our way.”

TPPF SYNOPSIS OF THE SENATE BORDER BILL

• The bill contains a phony “border emergency authority” that actually allows in about 1.3 million known illegal aliens annually, and therefore likely several million more unknown.
• The bill furthermore cripples its own “border emergency authority” by a variety of mechanisms:
  • By allowing any immigration officer to unilaterally and unreviewably exempt any number of illegal aliens from the count triggering the authority.
  • By exempting illegal aliens from “noncontiguous countries” from the count triggering the authority.
  • By effectively sunsetting itself across three years through an arbitrary limitation on the number of days per year the emergency may be invoked.
  • By allowing the President to unilaterally and unreviewably suspend any invocation of a border emergency.
• The bill gives over $2.3 billion to NGOs who have, wittingly or not, abetted the border crisis and the human-trafficking cartels behind it.
• The bill fails to show any understanding of the Mexican state-cartel nexus that creates the invasion at our southern border.
• The bill provides funding for diplomatic activities on behalf of Ukraine and Israel, but not on behalf of the United States’ own border crisis.
• The bill provides hundreds of millions of dollars in unaccountable and discretionary funding for President Biden to give to corrupt foreign governments who are complicit in the border crisis.
• The bill provides a blank check for the Biden Administration’s DHS Secretary to release illegal aliens upon declaration of an intent to seek asylum — dropping a requirement for an actual asylum claim.
• The bill provides no meaningful oversight for illegal aliens who are released into the United States.
• The bill purports to shorten the broken asylum-claims system, but does not actually reform it.