Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) said Thursday on Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom” that his bipartisan immigration deal crafted with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) will boost security at the border while providing a pathway to citizenship for the DREAMers.
Anchor Dana Perino asked, “You are working on some legislation. What do you want to accomplish?”
Tillis said, “We want to seal the border. We want to prevent 2 million crossings every year – with Title 42 going away, potentially many more than that. We want to protect our border patrol agents. We lost one this week trying to go after some of the people you just described. They are evading border patrol. They are not presenting themselves for asylum and trying to get to this country to continue the expansion of the cartel’s illegal actions. We want to reduce Fentanyl coming across the border and secure the border. And we want to make sure that the crisis at the border, that the president has to understand exists, has to be solved.”
He added, “The 800 million a year that the cartels are making for human trafficking is aiding and abetting the flood of Fentanyl to this country. I think that when we’re talking about what we’re talking about proposing here is simply looking at a small portion of the population that even President Trump supported as a path to citizenship. Here is what they have to do. They have to be in school. They have to be gainfully employed. They can be in the military. They can’t have a criminal record and never have been on any sort of federal assistance. These are people that came to this country as minors who are now doctors, scientists, teachers, hundreds serving in the military. I think the American people understand this is very different than this concept of amnesty. This will give them a path, and it is not automatic. They will have to work and maintain those high standards. And for that, we get a closed border, and we shut down the cartels. That seems to me like something worth working on.”
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