NumbersUSA is warning House Republicans that it will be scoring votes for the House border supplemental bill as “a vote for continued open borders.”
In a message to House Republicans, obtained by Breitbart News, the limited immigration group warned that the bill under consideration, expected to receive a vote Thursday, “fails” to lay the blame for the ongoing border crisis at the feet of President Obama and does not rein in future expansions of his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program or similar actions to provide unilateral amnesty to illegal immigrants.
“The American people understand that his lawlessness and his illegal amnesty, DACA, directly precipitated this crisis, and yet the House bill does absolutely nothing to curb his lawlessness and prevent him from expanding his illegal amnesty, as he is threatening to do,” the Numbers message reads.
According to Numbers, the Republican strategy to offer a vote on a revised version of Tennessee Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn’s measure targeting DACA and future expansions “should be rejected. The group described the effort as a “cynical ploy by Leadership to fool Republicans into supporting a bad bill.”
“The Leadership defanged the Blackburn bill to the point of uselessness, and their obvious attempt to bribe members into supporting a bad border bill by offering a subsequent vote on a useless DACA bill should anger Republicans, not encourage them to capitulate,” NumbersUSA Director of Government Relations Rosemary Jenks elaborated to Breitbart News.
Overall, Numbers argued that that the primary border bill legislation will make the crisis worse by creating new obstacles to remove unaccompanied illegal immigrant minor and fails to provide “serious asylum reforms” to deal with the fraud in the system.
“In short, H.R. 5230, the border supplemental, is not a serious effort to actually solve the border crisis and it should be opposed, just as Leadership’s attempt to bribe Members into supporting it should be rejected,” the Numbers message reads.
The Center for Immigration Studies, another anti-amnesty group, also released an analysis of the House Border bill, stressing that it “ensures continued illegal influx.”
“While the appropriations sections of the bill are a great improvement over the President’s request, the sections of the bill addressing the processing of unaccompanied alien children will cause more problems than they solve,” CIS Senior Research Fellow Dan Cadman said.
Read NumbersUSA’s full message to House Republicans:
NumbersUSA will score a vote in support of H.R. 5230, the House border supplemental, as a vote for continued open borders.
The bill utterly fails to place the blame for the border crisis where it squarely belongs: on President Obama. The American people understand that his lawlessness and his illegal amnesty, DACA, directly precipitated this crisis, and yet the House bill does absolutely nothing to curb his lawlessness and prevent him from expanding his illegal amnesty, as he is threatening to do.
GOP Leadership’s attempt to bribe House Republicans into supporting H.R. 5230 by offering a subsequent vote on H.R. 5272–a toothless, loophole ridden rewrite of the original Blackburn/Cruz bills–should be rejected. The new, watered down version of the Blackburn bill will do nothing but send a clear message to President Obama that Congress is not serious about limiting his abuse of power. H.R. 5272 is nothing more than a cynical ploy by Leadership to fool Republicans into supporting a bad bill.
The language in H.R. 5230, the border supplemental, that purports to “fix” the 2008 Wilberforce Anti-Trafficking Act will actually make the crisis worse by layering new procedural hurdles over current hurdles before any UACs, including Mexicans under this bill, can be removed. Rather than simply expediting the removal of Central American UACs, the House bill compounds the problem by adding UACs from contiguous countries to a convoluted, multi-layered hearing and review process that guarantees the UACs multiple opportunities to remain in the United States for years. The bill even fails to prevent HHS from turning over UACs to illegal-alien family members in the United States.
The House bill includes no serious asylum reforms to halt the massive abuse of our asylum system. Nor does it include needed reforms to the Special Immigrant Juvenile visa program or the parole system. (The new Leadership-approved version of the Blackburn bill, H.R. 5272, actually encourages abuse of the parole system by specifically exempting parole from its unenforceable restrictions.)
In short, H.R. 5230, the border supplemental, is not a serious effort to actually solve the border crisis and it should be opposed, just as Leadership’s attempt to bribe Members into supporting it should be rejected.