Dem Rep. Bera Pushes Back on Blinken on SIVs: We Contacted Biden Admin. on Backlog in January and They Didn’t Work on It Until July

On Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “MTP Daily,” Rep. Ami Bera (D-CA) reacted to Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s opening statement before the House stating that the Biden administration inherited a flawed SIV situation by stating that members of Congress reached out to the Biden administration back in January to get through the SIV backlog and “It really wasn’t until July that the administration started to work through this backlog and get folks out.”

Bera said, “I don’t think that’s quite fair. Because Congress has authorized multiple thousands of visas that went unused. So, you could criticize the Trump administration for basically shutting the program down, and then the pandemic on top of that for slowing the process down. But as soon as they came into office, we reached out, along with other members of Congress, in a bipartisan way, to say, let’s get through this backlog of tens of thousands of individuals that have already started the process. Once the withdrawal decision was made, we knew that one of the possible outcomes was a collapse of the Afghan government and that there was an importance of speeding up the process. It really wasn’t until July that the administration started to work through this backlog and get folks out. So, I don’t think the criticism of Congress is truly fair. I think…if they had suggestions on unburdening the process, they should have come to us.”

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