The process is indefensible: It is immoral, from any ideological perspective, to vote on an 1,169-page omnibus with new provisions on immigration amid a border crisis. We are already four and a half months into this fiscal year and have been operating on stopgap bills. There is no rush to vote on something like this, which will fund seven departments for the remainder of the year, within a few hours when we should have another stopgap bill while we debate, and even discover, the contents of this long-term bill that makes important statutory changes. The only reason one would pursue this process is to hide things from the American people.
Here are the immediate issues to flag:
This bill contains a blatant amnesty for the worst cartel smugglers: Section 224(a) prohibits the deportation of anyone who is sponsoring an “unaccompanied” minor illegal alien – or who says they might sponsor a UAC, or lives in a household with a UAC, or a household that potentially might sponsor a UAC. It’s truly difficult to understate the betrayal behind this provision. One of the driving factors of the invasion is the misinterpretation of the UAC law. Under current law, Central American teenagers are only treated as refugees if they are A) a victim of “A severe form of trafficking” and B) have no relatives in the country. Yet almost all of them are self-trafficked by these very illegal relatives who are indeed present in the country. Rather than clamping down on this fleecing of the American people, the bill gives amnesty to the very people paying the cartels to invade us!
“We can call this the MS-13 Household Protection Act of 2019,” said Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies. “We know that 80 percent of the UAC sponsors are in the country illegally. The number of people this would protect would reach into the hundreds of thousands, if all of the household or potential household members are counted. ICE has estimated that 30-40 percent of the MS-13 members it has arrested in the last two years arrived as UACs. There is no reason to shield any of these individuals from deportation. After all, if the minor is living with family, they should no longer be considered unaccompanied anyway. If there are illegal aliens here who do not yet have a child here to serve as a deportation shield, this certainly is an incentive for them to make the arrangements to bring one.”
h/t WRSA
