Dear Commons Community,

The National Border Patrol Council, which represents Border Patrol agents tasked with keeping America safe, yesterday endorsed the bipartisan border security legislation that has been making its way through the U.S. Senate.

“Since Joe Biden has been in office, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has averaged over 6,700 apprehensions per day, and the vast majority have been released under a policy known as catch-and-release,” said National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd. “Approximately 60% of all border apprehensions are single adults, a good number of whom are men of military age. The Border Act of 2024 will codify into law authorities that U.S. Border Patrol agents never had in the past. This will allow us to remove single adults expeditiously and without a lengthy judicial review, which historically has required the release of these individuals into the interior of the U.S.”

The statement continues: “This alone will drop illegal border crossings nationwide and will allow a great many of our agents to get back to detecting and apprehending those who want to cross our borders illegally and evade apprehension. While not perfect, the Border Act of 2024 is a step in the right direction and is far better than the status quo, which is why the National Border Patrol Council endorses the bill and hopes for a quick passage.”

The National Border Patrol Council represents approximately 18,000 Border Patrol agents and personnel who are charged with enforcing the country’s immigration laws.

For months, a bipartisan group of Senate negotiators led by Republican Senator James Lankford from Oklahoma, Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona, and Democratic Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut have worked to produce bipartisan border security legislation.

The lead GOP negotiator for the Senate border security bill, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., responded to widespread criticism of the bipartisan legislation as some warn it could be “dead on arrival” if it reaches the House. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., alongside other prominent GOP critics, have voiced their opposition to the $118 billion spending package, claiming it doesn’t go far enough to curb illegal immigration. 

But Lankford urged critics to read the bill, arguing it will create a “faster and stronger system” of deportation and will “flip the script” on Biden’s immigration policy.

“Are we, as Republicans, going to have press conferences and complain the border is bad and then intentionally leave it open after the worst month in American history in December?” Lankford questioned during “Fox & Friends” on Monday. “Now we’ve got to actually determine, are we going to just complain about things or are we going to actually address and change as many things as we can?”

“If we have the shot — and it’s amazing to me, if I go back two months ago and say we had the shot under a Democrat president to dramatically increase detention beds, deportation flights, lock down the border, to be able to change the asylum laws, to be able to accelerate the process, no one would have believed it.”

“And now no one actually wants to be able to fix it, says, ‘I don’t want to even debate it. I don’t want to discuss it.’ We have to decide, as Republicans, what are we going to actually do about the border and leave it open or actually leave it closed?” he continued. 

Unfortunately, the vast majority of congressional Republicans are incapable of putting the country ahead of their party.

Thank you Senator Lankford for your leadership and at least trying!

Tony

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.