A top official at the Department of Homeland Security asserts the country’s immigration system is broken and emphasizes the need for a bipartisan dialogue to fix it. Blas Nuñez-Neto, the Assistant Secretary for Border and Immigration Policy, made these remarks at a news conference at the Foreign Press Centers.
“Congress has not updated our immigration laws and our asylum laws in decades,” Nuñez told reporters. That won’t change until members of Congress to work together to “update these statutes and address some of the infirmities in our immigration system that are contributing to what we are seeing on the border.” The number of illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border have surged since 2020.
“We are encouraged by the bipartisan conversations that are taking place in the United States Senate, and we encourage our colleagues in the House to also come together, again, on a bipartisan basis, to resolve these issues,” Nuñez noted.
But the political reality of passing major immigration reform on Capitol Hill remains unlikely. While there is agreement for the need for immigration reform, there is stark disagreement on what that reform should be. And major bipartisan deals on immigration have eluded lawmakers and presidents for more than three decades.
Just this week, House Republicans opened a series of hearings dedicated to impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, portraying him as a symbol of the Biden’s administration’s inability to control a surge of migrants illegally crossing the southern border.
Nuñez also emphasized the limitations of executive actions, acknowledging surges in migration spanning over a decade under administrations of both political parties.
He also expressed disappointment in the actions of Republican governors of Texas and Arizona, criticizing their deployment of personnel without adequate coordination, saying we “believe that they are at times putting migrants at risk and also potentially putting our law enforcement officers at risk when they deploy their personnel without fully coordinating their actions”.
Nuñez underscored the efforts of various agencies in supporting communities and NGOs involved in migrant reception, acknowledging the funding challenges “We have distributed more than a billion dollars to support those NGOs and state and local governments, and we as part of our emergency funding request also asked for additional funding for that program, which we view as critical”.
“We recognize, though, that’s a drop in the bucket in terms of what the need is throughout the country, and again, we view this unfortunately as the cost of this broken immigration system that really only the U.S. Congress can address.”
Regarding the immigration processing backlog, Nunez attributed it to the immigration system’s shortcomings. He mentioned efforts to streamline processes and requested additional resources, including asylum officers and immigration court personnel, to address backlogs. Nuñez concluded by urging Congress to come together in a bipartisan manner to allocate resources and address underlying issues in the immigration system.
Nuñez was joined at the news conference by Katie Tobin, Deputy Assistant to President Biden, and Eric Jacobstein, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Central America.
