(Headline USA) Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, begged the Biden administration this week to guarantee “repercussions” for illegal immigration.
Cuellar, a border Democrat who was an outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump’s efforts to build a wall along the southern border, admitted that the current administration’s endless “catch and release cycle” was unsustainable.
“You got to have repercussions at the border,” he told Fox News. “The asylum law, the criteria for letting people in, can be adjusted.”
The Democrat also admitted that President Joe Biden’s decision not to deport illegal immigrants was making the border crisis worse.
“If you have in one year millions of individuals that are encountered, and then you let hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them in, that becomes the pull factor,” Cuellar said. “That catch and release … is the pull factor.”
Cuellar also blasted the Biden administration for not working to expedite the asylum claims process and instead allowing millions of illegals to remain in the country and sit in a backlogged system.
“Why are we allowing hundreds of thousands of them in when, at the end of the day, most of them are going to be rejected?” he asked.
Biden himself admitted last week that the southern border is not secure, though he refused to accept blame for that fact.
“No, it’s not,” Biden said when asked by a reporter whether the border is secure after he gave remarks before a bipartisan group of mayors at the White House. “I haven’t believed that for the last 10 years, and I’ve said it for the last 10 years. Give me the money.”
Homeland Defense Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas previously admitted that any additional funding allocated for border security would not be used for deportations but rather to assist further in processing illegals.
The White House has routinely blamed congressional Republicans for the border crisis even though the GOP passed legislation last year that would have addressed it. Because the bill did not include amnesty, Senate Democrats and Biden declared it “dead on arrival.”
