On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) acknowledged that President Joe Biden hasn’t done what he can on the “crisis” on the border that has existed for his entire administration, but the courts “often” prevent doing certain things “And the administration said,” that if the Senate bill had passed, “they will use these authorities.”
Kelly said, “So, if you go back decades, Washington has failed the American people on border security and immigration and the situation at the southern border for decades. It’s really been a major problem. And the last three years, since I’ve been in the Senate, this has been at a crisis level. And over the last several months, we’ve had Democrats and Republicans working together to try to solve this problem, and we came up with good bipartisan legislation that would go a long way to fixing the crisis, the migration crisis, and also address this humanitarian crisis we have on the border. And, over the last couple of days here, it fell apart in the Senate. And I would say, it’s one of my most disappointing days since being up here on Capitol Hill.”
Host Bret Baier then asked, “I should point out that you’ve been very critical as well of the Biden administration on a number of fronts. However, if you look at the border crossings, just the former president to the President, 2.4 to 7.9 [million]. Now we get word that a million encounters by CBP have happened since October 1, it’s staggering. Now, is there anything preventing President Biden from going down to the border — and he hasn’t done that — and saying, listen, they didn’t give me everything I want and they didn’t do the bill, but I have things I can do and here it is: Remain in Mexico, catch and release end, do it by executive order. What’s preventing him from doing that tomorrow?”
Kelly responded, “Well, often the courts [prevent] a lot of this. And you’ve got to remember under the former president, there was Title 42 because we had a healthcare crisis, a pandemic. That doesn’t exist anymore. I’ve been critical of this administration as well. You were in my office a year ago and we talked specifically about this, what more could they do? But right now, we came up with bipartisan legislation that we worked on for months that does a lot of really good things. It’s $20 billion for border security. What this does to the Border Patrol, hiring new agents, asylum officers, building new detention facilities, that’s why this legislation is supported by the Border Patrol union, why The Wall Street Journal came out in favor of it because it’s good legislation that will help. And the administration said, if this passes, they will use these authorities. Our job is to pass legislation. We failed to do that today. And I think this is a really shameful day for the United States Senate.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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