Details are expected to be released in the coming days on a bipartisan bill, that if passed, would give President Biden emergency authority to shut down the processing and release of migrants who cross the border illegally to then claim asylum.
The measure, however, would only be enforced if the average number of migrants crossing the Southern border becomes "overwhelming."
“We haven’t seen any text on it,” said Chris Cabrera, Vice President of the National Border Patrol Council and an agent in the Rio Grande Valley.
The union represents approximately 16,000 U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement agents.
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When asked whether the bill would help curb illegal crossings, Cabrera questions how authorities would shut down the border.
“As far as turning people away at the border, I don’t know how that would work,” he said. “If you have someone swimming across and you tell them to go back and they drown, is that on me for sending them back? Or do we take them to a port of entry and send them back kind of like we did under Title 42? There are a lot of ‘what-ifs’ there.”
Biden released a statement saying the compromise would increase the number of immigration judges, CBP agents, and asylum officers.
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Initial findings show illegal crossings fell during the first half of January after a record 300,000 encounters in December.
“During the early days of the Obama administration we had 21,000 people a year that requested asylum on our Southern border,” Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma testified before lawmakers. “We had that in two days in December. That’s how things have shifted. That’s why this is not a partisan issue, this is a national issue.”
Lankford supports reigning in ‘loopholes’ in outdated asylum policies about migrants being released into the U.S. with court hearings in five to ten years.
They are released into the country, he says, because of the sheer number of migrants crossing the Mexico-U.S. border, overwhelming immigration officials.
Lankford has criticized immigration officials about the implementation of the country’s parole authority that is being afforded to migrants who may not meet specific requirements of the policy.
“If you tell us ahead of time that you’re coming, when you come to a port of entry, we will give you a work permit when you arrive,” he said. “The vast majority of people coming into the country will say: “I have fear in my country” because the cartels have told them that if you say the magic words you’ll be released into the country because that puts you on track for asylum, when actually what it does it puts you in a 10-year backlog of claims that are out there.”
The political back and forth over the agreement that took months to happen comes amid the ongoing legal clash between Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the Biden Administration over the border.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled Texas cannot block Border Patrol from accessing a park used for processing along the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass and cannot block federal authorities from cutting down the razor wire erected to keep migrants from reaching U.S. soil.
“But it didn’t say Texas couldn’t put up more wire,” said SMU political science professor Cal Jillson.
Texas is also part of separate federal court cases related to its use of buoys placed in the river which migrant groups claim have injured migrants trying to seek asylum.
Jillson is confident the state will lose these battles in court but recognizes it is a process that could drag on for years.
Jillson says the so-called standoff on the Texas-Mexico border has journalists from around the world reaching out to ask if he thinks Texas is going to succeed from the Union.
He cautions both sides to remember, the world is watching “whether tensions will build to the point of conflict because many countries around the world know what internal conflict looks like… So, it is in our best interest to be careful.”
“Some Democrats are calling on Biden to nationalize the Texas Guard, just to take it over which Biden is entitled to do, but that’s the kind of direct clash between federal and state powers that can escalate and that is very dangerous,” he said. “My hope is we can fight this out through the federal courts.”
Cabrera says immediately turning away migrants who do not present a clear case for asylum would easily fix the problem.
“Right now, people are gaming the system,” he said. “There are people out there that actually need asylum, but their claims are watered down by everybody that is doing this to get over on the system. The government can fix it by putting asylum officers at the front of this process as opposed to four, five years down the road.”
