Ninth District Georgia Congressman Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) traveled to America’s southern border this week to see how Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are dealing with the flow of immigrants into the U.S.
“The El Paso processing centers, like so many on our southern border, are far beyond capacity and are severely understaffed because of the large number of migrants crossing the border every day,” Collins says in a press release.
“People lined up wall-to-wall in the facility, waiting to be processed after entering the country illegally. Almost all the migrants I spoke with said they were coming into the U.S. to work,” he says.
Collins says he spoke with “agent after agent” who told him they were “overwhelmed.” The Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee shared his assessment that the “vast majority” of people crossing the U.S. border are economic migrants who are making “frivolous” asylum claims.
“Unfortunately, because America’s credible fear standard is extremely low, it incentivizes people to abuse the U.S. asylum system,” the congressman from Hall County says. “As a result, baseless asylum claims hurt people with legitimate asylum claims and increase the backlog in U.S. immigration courts.”
Collins says Democrats are “deceiving themselves” if they believe there’s no humanitarian crisis at the border.
But Democrats have acknowledged there is a humanitarian crisis. Party leaders first began calling it that when the Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration began separating families at the border. Still, Democratic congressional leaders have been far less eager than their Republican counterparts to call the border situation a national emergency. They’ve accused President Trump of manufacturing a crisis in order to obtain more funding for his border wall.
Most politicians and voters agree something must be done to fix the nation’s immigration system but reaching bipartisan agreement on legislation to do that continues to elude Congress and White House.
Collins introduced the Fix the Immigration Loopholes Act in January. He says the bill would close three key loopholes in immigration policy driving the border surge. The congressman also proposed emergency resources for the border crisis in May.
