We haven’t seen numbers like this in 21 years at the border. In July alone, Customs and Border Protection encountered approximately 200,000 people at our southern border—the highest number since the year 2000. On top of that, the Biden Administration’s grand idea to solve this crisis at the border is to use taxpayer dollars to send attorneys to the border to represent these illegal immigrants in their removal proceedings. That type of representation isn’t even guaranteed for United States citizens. This would be a special provision for illegal immigrants that isn’t even available to you, me or any legal U.S. citizen.
Sending government-funded lawyers to the border is not going to solve the problem. Currently, there are approximately 1.3 million immigration cases piled up in the court system. What are the lawyers going to do?
ACLJ Senior Counsel Andy Ekonomou explained just how absurd the Biden Administration’s decision to send lawyers to the border really is:
“That makes absolutely no sense legally or any other way. … A person in the U.S. who claims his or her constitutional rights were violated in some fashion and files a civil action – which these deportations hearings are simply civil actions – would not be entitled to a lawyer … , so you would be giving an illegal immigrant, or an immigrant, or a migrant, however you want to call it . . . a greater right and a right to counsel that does not exist for American citizens who claim their constitutional rights have been violated. That doesn’t exist. You would be creating something for an illegal migrant. And the cost would be horrendous. No one talks about who’s going to pay for all these lawyers.”
ACLJ Director of Policy Harry Hutchison questions what the plan is after these lawyers are sent to the border:
“Well, I think the answer is there is no real plan. So, Biden’s border approach does not work. In my view it was never intended to work. Biden’s policy prescriptions represent a sustained attack on President Trump’s legacy, a sustained attack on the American people, and a sustained attack on common sense. In essence, the Biden Administration has engaged in a premeditated deliberate effort perhaps unintentionally to spread COVID throughout the U.S. and to spread crime. Why? In essence, to create more long-term voters for the Democratic party. This policy does not work. The American people should see through what the Biden Administration is doing.”
The crisis at the border is a perfect storm for criminals. They utilize situations like what is going on at our border to go about criminal activities while the world is distracted. ACLJ Senior Counsel for Global Affairs and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo discussed the rise of crime in our country in his new article and how the crisis on the border does not help:
“It is not just in Texas, Arizona, and California. … They are transporting these people all across America. They are dropping them in communities with which they are not familiar. And it is not just the virus that they may be carrying. They may come from backgrounds where violence was the norm. The risk of increased crime is traumatic.”
The border crisis is only one of the major issues the Biden Administration has dropped the ball on. Secretary Pompeo adds how all of Biden’s policy decisions are connected:
“When you begin to say that the Second Amendment doesn’t permit people to bear arms, when you defund the police, when you start attacking faith communities who have always been in some of these most vulnerable populations. … When you begin to undermine that and pull out of these essential places, you are systematically building the conditions for violence and crime, you are rewarding it.
“Young kids are seeing this might be their only way to take care of themselves is to join a gang or become a part of a crime group. … These are the things that create the conditions that are difficult to get back from. We need mayors, county commissioners, city leaders all across America … to understand that the people are being harmed by this violence and the idea that you are going to undermine law enforcement is cataclysmically dangerous for the most vulnerable populations.”
We’ve filed a lawsuit to get to the bottom of this and figure out who is responsible and demand that these agencies turn over documents regarding the handling of the border crisis. We will continue to hold the Biden Administration accountable for the outcomes of their own flawed policies.{eoa}
For the original article, visit aclj.org.
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