Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is warning President Joe Biden to clamp down on the uncontrolled migrant inflow at the U.S. border.
“They are rolling up their sleeves and working on this. I think it will get better in the next few months,” Schumer told ABC’s The View on Thursday, adding, “If it doesn’t, I will go to them and say, ‘You’ve got to do better.’ I will be public.”
Schumer is very pro-migration, but has adopted a cautious strategy towards migration legislation since 2014 when Democrats lost five Senate seats after voters punished them for Schumer’s 2013-14 “Gang of Eight” amnesty push. The 2014 loss left Schumer in the minority during all four years of President Donald Trump’s tenure.
Other Democrats are trying to warn Biden and his deputies, who include many pro-migration zealots such as Alejandro Mayorkas, the current secretary at the Department of Homeland Security.
“The problem is, they’re listening to immigrants and activists, which is okay,” Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) told Fox News March 6. The border representative added:
But they’ve got to listen to the local communities, and they’ve got to listen to those men and women in green. Because, first of all, our Border Patrol agents have not been vaccinated, not all of them. we have to get them vaccinated. We’ve got to get our NGOs vaccinated as we’re letting thousands of people [come] in.
Democrats’ concern about Biden’s easy-migration border policies may help explain the slow movement of the their party’s amnesty bills through the House and Senate.
Biden and his deputies, plus Schumer and many other Democrats, continue to blame President Donald Trump for the recent surge caused by their policy of extracting migrants from Central America.
“I’ve got to give [Biden and his deputies] a little bit of a chance because they inherited a big, big mess created by Donald Trump whose views on immigrants — it just turned me off,” Schumer told The View.
“We’ve seen surges before; surges tend to respond to hope, and there was a significant hope for a more humane policy after four years of, you know, pent up demand” under Trump, said Roberta Jacobson, Biden’s border policy chief at the White House. “I don’t know whether I would call that a coincidence, but I certainly think that the idea that a more humane policy would be in place may have driven people to make that [migration] decision,” she said on March 10. “Perhaps, more importantly, it definitely drove smugglers to spread disinformation about what was now possible,” she added.
Biden’s deputies may be trying to edge away from their easy-migration policies as huge numbers of poor foreigners rush to get into the United States.
“Some more [migrants] may have come to our border, and there has been a large flow of children across the border,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Thursday. “We recognize that, but we made a policy decision because we felt it was the humane approach.”
However, Jacobson told reporters on March 10, “going forward, we will continue to look for ways to provide legal [migration] avenues in the region for people needing protection.”