Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) said Thursday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” that President Joe Biden should not be held responsible for “transnational gangs that are smuggling people to the border of the United States.”
Co-host Andrea Mitchell said, “It’s one thing to spend more money on the border, the president was agreeing with that in his supplemental proposal but to try to resolve decades and decades of disagreements over fundamental border policy at the risk of not funding Israel and/or Ukraine, that doesn’t make sense, does it?”
Bennet said, “I think that doesn’t make much sense. We shouldn’t be doing it in the course of this negotiation. I was part of the gang of eight in 2013 working with John McCain and others to write the last immigration bill. It was bipartisan, it passed this place with 68 votes. That’s a massive bipartisan vote. Unfortunately, it was stopped, it was vetoed by the Freedom Caucus in the House.”
He added, “Think about how different American would have been if we passed that bipartisan bill, both in terms of the pathway to citizenship for the DREAMers, for the 11 million people that are undocumented, and for our border security, for that matter. What’s changed in the intervening years is there’s now a billion dollar enterprise by transnational gangs that are smuggling people to the border of the United States. That’s not the Biden administration’s fault. That’s something that’s happening in the world. We have to come together to contend with that. Whether we get that done now in this negotiation, I don’t think is all that likely. This work will still be done for us on the back end of it.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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