Bipartisan senators embark on extensive border trip following Biden’s ‘sanitized’ stop
Anna Giaritelli
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EL PASO, Texas — Eight Democratic and Republican senators will follow President Joe Biden’s short visit to the U.S.-Mexico border with an extensive two-day trip in El Paso and Arizona, meeting with federal, state, and local officials responding to the immigration crisis.
Border state Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) will lead a delegation to West Texas on Monday afternoon for a day of tours that will go well into the night as lawmakers go out on the border with federal Border Patrol agents.
The group will head to Arizona on Tuesday for similar meetings with all three levels of government officials and learn how the surges of immigrants into both states have affected them differently.
“Arizona’s border communities shoulder the burden of Washington’s failure to solve our border and immigration crisis,” Sinema, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Government Operations and Border Management, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “I’m glad to lead a bipartisan group of my colleagues to visit the southwest border, and I appreciate their commitment to learning and understanding the many diverse challenges facing our border communities.”
A spokeswoman for Sinema said the trip was already on the books before Biden announced last week that he would stop in El Paso Sunday on his way to Mexico City and that Sinema had announced the visit in a floor speech on Dec. 20.
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The gang of eight — three Democrats, one independent, and four Republicans — will include Sens. James Lankford (R-OK), Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Chris Murphy (D-CT), Jerry Moran (R-KS), and Chris Coons (D-DE).
“It’s time to get serious about enforcing the law and supporting our Border Patrol, and this trip will help to show my colleagues the need to fix our nation’s broken asylum process and the need to improve the vetting of illegal migrants,” said Lankford, the top Republican on the subcommittee.
Senators will begin the trip Monday afternoon with a roundtable discussion and tour of an abandoned school that the city has repurposed as a space to shelter immigrants as part of the $10 million spent responding to the crisis.
While at the city’s temporary Emergency Migrant Operations Facility, formerly Bassett Middle School, they will hear from El Paso government leaders, nonprofit groups, and law enforcement about the local economic and public safety impacts of more than 90,000 immigrant releases downtown since August.
“Participants will share the local economic and public safety impacts of the ongoing humanitarian crisis at the southern border with the senators and highlight the need for long-term solutions for the region,” according to a media advisory from the senators.
Leaders from the Texas Department of Public Safety and Texas Military Department overseeing Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star border security mission will also meet with the group to discuss the state’s efforts to secure the border as daily encounters of illegal immigrants topped 2,200 in late December.
Later Monday, the group will visit with Customs and Border Protection employees from the Office of Field Operations at the port of entry and Border Patrol agents who work between the ports.
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Biden visited El Paso Sunday afternoon and spent the majority of his time with CBP OFO officers at the port of entry, learning about how drugs, contraband, and people can be hidden and detected inside vehicles. He spoke briefly with several Border Patrol officials and also toured a city facility that provides resources for immigrants once they have been released by the federal government into the community.
Biden received criticism from Republicans who said the brief stop in El Paso was too little, too late, and was so choreographed that he did not encounter any immigrants. Abbott handed Biden a letter as he greeted him on the tarmac Sunday that raised concerns that El Paso had been “sanitized” prior to the president’s arrival, with the city clearing out some immigrant camps on the streets.