On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “José Díaz-Balart Reports,” Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) stated that if President Joe Biden would simply have the same border repercussions that President Barack Obama had, it would bring down the numbers of people coming to the border.
Cuellar said, “I believe that we should have detentions and we should deport people that don’t have a legal right to be here. Look, the asylum law is very clear. You’ve got to have state persecution, based on five things: race, nationality, political belief, religion, part of a social class. And if you don’t fit that, you can come here for a job, you can come here for economic reasons, you can come in for so many other reasons, they don’t qualify. So, why are we allowing everybody to come in — most people to come in, stay here four or five years, and then have an immigration judge deport them? I live at the border, and we’ve been talking about this since 2013. And if you look at some of the past experiences that we’ve had with different administrations, I think President Obama, along with Secretary Jeh Johnson, I think they had it right. They gave people their claim to asylum, but, at the end of the day, they deported people, they detained people, and they just did one thing, they enforced Title 8.”
He added, “If you have repercussions at the border, like we did under President Obama, then the numbers would certainly go down. They won’t eliminate them to zero, but it would bring them down to where it’s a lot more manageable to do it. If you don’t have repercussions at the border, if you and I were down there and then we said, hey, look, … we can get to the U.S. border, and then they’re going to let us in, of course we’re going to pay the $8,000 to a coyote, to the bad people to come in. But if I had — if you and I saw that we were probably [going to] be held and then deported because we don’t qualify, I would think about that and you would think about that. It’s simple repercussions that you’ve got to have at the border following what the law is right now.”
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