Senators weighed in on whether President Biden should take executive action at the southern border to address the ongoing migrant surge, with some lawmakers saying it’s Congress’ responsibility to pass legislation.
“The president needs to address the most pressing national security issue we have in the country today, which is the southern border,” Sen. Pete Ricketts, a Nebraska Republican, told Fox News. “I would hope he would change his current policies, which have created this catastrophe at our southern border, and do something. He’s got the powers at his disposable to do it.”
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But Sen. Ben Cardin said Congress, not the president, must solve the border crisis.
“We need to pass the legislation that was worked out between Sen. [James] Lankford and Sen. [Chris] Murphy,” the Maryland Democrat said. “Congress needs to act. It’s our responsibility. I want to see that bill passed.”
Republicans aggressively criticized a border security deal when it was released earlier this month, leading it to die in the Senate. The long-awaited bill would have allotted $20 billion to immigration enforcement to hire asylum claim officers and Border Patrol agents, provided millions toward border wall reinforcement and given more authority to the president and the administration to close the border.
The failure to pass the deal led Biden to consider executive action to tackle the ongoing border crisis.
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“The Republicans are being obstinate, obdurate, in their opposition to legislation passing,” Sen. Ed Markey told Fox News. “That’s sad.”
“To the extent to which now the president has to contemplate actions that he can take using his inherent authority, then I await what proposal that he has, but it’s only reluctantly, in the absence of a bipartisan approach that the president wanted to see put in place in the first place,” the Massachusetts Democrat said.
But Sen. Roger Wicker said Biden should have taken action to solve the border crisis long ago.
“I think the president should enforce the law, and he has not been doing that,” the Mississippi Republican said. “He’s been allowing people in by the millions.”
The southern border has faced record numbers of migrant encounters under the Biden administration, including over 2.4 million encounters during fiscal 2023, a sharp uptick from roughly 1.7 million in 2021, according to Customs and Border Protection data. In December, encounters skyrocketed to a record 302,000.
“President Biden’s committed to doing what we have to do to both protect national security and reform our broken immigration system,” Sen. Chris Coons told Fox News. The Delaware Democrat added that he was disappointed the bipartisan border security deal failed, but said Biden should step in.
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Executive action “may be the only option that President Biden has,” he said. “It will not have a strong legal standing. It may be immediately suspended in the courts, but we have to do something to make sure we do not have a national security threat at our southern border.”
On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden had no plans to issue executive action during his Thursday visit to Brownsville, Texas. She said the best solution to fix the “broken immigration system” would have been if Republicans had “moved forward with the bipartisan deal that came out of the Senate.”
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Sen. John Fetterman similarly criticized Republicans.
“Our party showed up to support [the deal] and address the border and one party walked away from it,” the Pennsylvania Democrat said. “I do believe we have a crisis at the border.”
He said he didn’t know whether Biden should take executive action.
“We need a deal, and I know the president believes as I do that we need to address the border,” Fetterman said. “We are going to address it.”
