Dallas City Wire

On May 11, Congressman Marc Veasey (TX-33) released the following statement after voting against H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act:

“We need comprehensive, serious solutions to fix our broken immigration system and secure the border once and for all. The Republican-led H.R.2 is a partisan and unserious piece of legislation that is far from what we actually need to fix the challenges that we face at this moment.

“This bill would wreck our economy and create disorder at the border. It would specifically devastate American farms and drive up grocery prices, destroy our asylum system, force unaccompanied children into dangerous situations, jail families and children indefinitely, and do nothing to stem the deadly flow of fentanyl.

“Now that Title 42 is ending, Republicans need to move past their harmful political stunts and work with us in a bipartisan manner on an immigration bill that truly secures the border, upholds America’s obligations to all migrants, Dreamers, and asylum seekers, and will solve the workforce challenges that we face.”

If enacted, H.R. 2 would:

•    Resume building Trump’s border wall, a harmful waste of taxpayer resources. It would restrict the ability for landowners, local communities and tribes to assert legal challenges opposing the construction of the wall, and thus pave the way for irreparable and unchecked harms to the borderlands.

•    Provides no additional resources for CBP officers at ports of entry – and leaves them out to dry in the wake of Title 42 being lifted.

•    Eliminates funding to nonprofits, including the Red Cross, and faith-based organizations that provide essential food, shelter and legal services to asylum seekers.

•    Ends America’s decades-old asylum system and creates more bottlenecks at ports of entry by limiting CBP agents’ abilities to process asylum seekers between ports.

•    Permanently and indefinitely detain asylum seekers and rips apart families already living and working in the U.S. from our communities.

•    Destroy American farms and our food supply by imposing E-Verify nationwide on all U.S. businesses, doing unimaginable damage to the economy and causing huge disruptions in our nation’s food system.

Original source can be found here.