HIDALGO, Texas — Democrats and Republicans from southern border states called on the Biden administration to adapt their proposals for quickly handling asylum claims and preventing migrants from being released into the U.S. interior as the migration crisis continues to worsen.

The bicameral group of lawmakers, Sens. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, and Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat, as well as Texas Reps. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat, and Tony Gonzales, a Republican, gathered at the international bridge between Reynosa, Mexico, and Hidalgo, Texas, Wednesday, calling the White House to do more amid Republicans' criticism that Vice President Kamala Harris is failing to stem the rising flow of migrants.

“There's plenty of people doing nothing, right? The next easiest thing to do is to blame somebody else, and there's plenty of people blaming somebody else,” Gonzales said. “I would argue one of the most difficult things to do is to roll up your sleeves, go to work, and try to find solutions to the problem. ... It doesn't matter whose fault it is. What matters is we have to solve this problem before it gets worse.”

The Bipartisan Border Solutions Act was introduced in April, as the number of people attempting to enter the United States illegally from Mexico reached a 21-year high. The bill would change how the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice respond to illegal migration, as well as asylum-seekers, by holding people in joint-agency facilities, tracking unaccompanied children after they have been released to ensure their safety, increasing the number of immigration judges, and mandating court proceedings take place on the border to avoid releasing hundreds of thousands of people into the U.S., as has happened under President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

“I'm glad that they're taking some of the ideas, and hopefully, they'll take more of those ideas and implement them,” said Cuellar. “We need to get more judges on the border, and I'll tell you why. If you have 100 people that ask for immigration, that is, asylum, an immigration judge will grant 12% of them, and 88% are going to be rejected. So why are we letting folks in when only 12 of them should be told ‘Bienvenidos,’ or whatever language they might be using?”

“We want the administration to take these actions and implement them right away,” Sinema said. “Our legislation ensures that when children are placed with sponsors around the country that these are individuals who are known to not have criminal records, who are not abusers, so that they that we have more ability to know that these children are in safe circumstances. Right now, we don't have that security. We can't track these kids for more than one month after they leave these facilities.”

The group toured the Department of Health and Human Services’ Delphi Emergency Intake Site, where unaccompanied children are held. At present, more than 17,000 children are in federal custody at existing facilities or one of the dozen emergency sites that have been stood up nationwide. The lawmakers also walked through the Border Patrol’s series of tents in Donna, Texas, where families and children are held after initially being apprehended on the border.

“There's a lot of people talking about the border who've never been to the border. They don't frankly know what they're talking about,” Cornyn said. “Nobody's raising their hand and offering ideas. We thought it was important, working together in a bipartisan, bicameral way ... to come up with a solution that we think will contribute to making progress."

Sinema and Cornyn toured each other’s states this week while the Senate is on a district work week.

For a link to the article, click here