You’d think that our elected officials would have better use for the billions of dollars they take from taxpayers against our will.
Yet another congressional delegation was in the Rio Grande Valley on Thursday, this time a group of Republicans who said they were here to assess the border with respect to the proposed lifting of immigration restrictions under Title 42 of the U.S. Code, which allows certain actions in the face of public health threats.
President Donald Trump invoked Title 42 to restrict immigration during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the number of cases, and deaths, tied to the disease subsiding, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has determined that the public health threat is low enough that the Title 42 application no longer applies. It remains in place, however, due to injunctions issued in response to Republican lawsuits challenging the lifting of the restrictions.
Thursday’s gathering was hardly a fact-finding mission to determine if our immigration system might be able to handle the thousands of immigrants who are expected to seek entry to the U.S. once the restrictions are lifted. The group did not allow the participation of any Valley residents or the media; like so many groups before, they toured sections of the border wall and took rides on the Rio Grande aboard Border Patrol boats.
The river and wall have little to do with our ability to process immigrants once they cross. They’d have done better to see elements that will come into play once the restrictions are lifted, such as immigration offices and even detention centers that currently are closed but might be needed.
Reform efforts must be bipartisan, and reflect open discussions of what is possible and what isn’t.
If immigration is the issue, then it must be the basis for determining whether our borders are open or closed. Officials can’t use a now-irrelevant public health issue — especially since many of those same Republicans denied that a public health threat ever existed, fighting mask mandates and other measures. Some even called the global pandemic, which has killed more than 1 million Americans and more than 6 million worldwide, a hoax.
At the very least, the group should have included Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Christopher Magnus, who was much more optimistic about easing the restrictions when he visited the Valley last week. The lawmakers could have grilled Magnus about his plans to handle the influx of immigrants — who will have to be processed sooner or later — and the reasons for his optimism. The CBP chief’s ideas might just work, after all.
But of course, that isn’t what the Congress members have in mind, no matter what they say. Apparently, they want to keep immigrants at bay for as long as possible, even though many of them could ease our nation’s critical need for workers and refugees’ desperate need for safe haven.
Enough, already. It’s time to stop these wasteful trips to the Valley that serve no real purpose other than to stir up their base of support. That support might actually widen if they stay in Washington and work with their colleagues on fixing a system that has been broken much too long.
