On Thursday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “NewsNation Live,” John Sandweg, who served as acting ICE Director during the Obama administration, said that “Certainly, there’s a crisis at the border.” And that the asylum process is abused because people know that making an asylum claim “gets them at least three, four, five years in the United States” because of how long it takes to resolve asylum claims.
Host Marni Hughes asked, “Is it a crisis, is it not a crisis. Are we spending too much time on the rhetoric and the words around it rather than focusing on the real issue? And I guess the bigger question of that is…has it begun to be a political talking point, what we’re seeing at the border?”
Sandweg answered, “I think the answer to all of your questions is yes. Certainly, there’s a crisis at the border. We’ve had a mass migration that really began in 2016, maybe even a little farther back than that, that we haven’t been able to stop. As the numbers demonstrate, really unprecedented flows of people coming to the United States. Unfortunately, the rhetoric in Washington has only increased. As always, the border’s a political football. We don’t find bipartisan solutions. I think everybody, each party seeks political gain from the border and really as a result, we don’t address the problem.”
He added, “[W]e have an asylum system, we have asylum laws that have been on the books for over 50 years in this country. What we have not done is adequately fund the asylum system. And the migrants — or really the smuggling groups that are recruiting — you have to understand, none of these migrants are showing up on accident. They’re all recruited by smugglers. The migrants themselves are just desperate to find a better life. And the smugglers go around and take advantage of that and exploit them by recruiting them in their home countries and bringing them to the border. But what they realize and what’s changed…is they realize that we have not funded the asylum system, that if you get to this country and you make a claim of asylum, it will be years before we can process the claim. And so, they’re exploiting that by coming up and making the claim, and that gets them at least three, four, five years in the United States. And obviously, once people realize that, more are going to come and the problem becomes worse.”
Sandweg further stated that until asylum claims are adjudicated quicker, “I think you’re going to continue to see this mass migration and the crisis will go unabated.” And that we “need a comprehensive approach. We need to look at how can we reform the work visa system to allow these people to come here lawfully and maybe seasonally.”
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