Texas Dem Henry Cueller slams Joe Biden delegation visiting Mexico border: 'They didn't talk to anybody'
The Joe Biden White House might have tried to convince the world that the situation at the country's southern border is far off from a crisis even as more and more immigrants crowd it hoping to get into America’s territory. Top Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi have defended the Biden administration saying the problem is a creation of the previous Donald Trump administration and the current president is only trying to fix a broken system that he has inherited.
But it seems not all in the Democratic Party are happy with the border situation. Texas Democratic Representative Henry Cueller on Friday, March 12, took a dig at the Biden administration’s handling of the border problem saying a delegation from the White House that visited the border this week did not speak to anyone.
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Cueller, 65, spoke on Fox News’s ‘Your World’ show where he slammed the White House delegation saying: “Any president should come down [and] really spend time with border communities. You know, the president sent a delegation and a bunch of folks from the White House. They didn't talk to anybody, not even members of Congress down here.”
“We’re still using Title 42 for male adults. For example, in Laredo, Texas, 73% of the people coming in are Mexican male adults, and they are all pretty much turned back to Mexico. So people are being returned back. Again, what is the law in the United States? Unless they become citizens, which, we have 11 or 12 million that have been in the shadows for so many years, they'll never be able to vote unless we change and have comprehensive immigration reform,” he added.
'They need to do more and listen to border communities'
Cueller, who served in the Texas House of Representative for 14 years and is serving as a lawmaker from the Lone Star State in the US House of Representatives for 15 years now, spoke to the conservative National Review earlier in March. There, he said while he is a Democrat who supports the administration, like he had done when another Democrat Barack Obama was in office, he also thinks sometimes “they need to do more and listen to the border communities”.
Last month, Cueller warned the Biden administration against loosening up things on unauthorized immigration, citing the impact it could lead on his own constituency (28th district) which has a long border with Mexico, local hospitals and the danger they pose in spreading the coronavirus. Cueller told Axios that while he supports Biden, he is apprehensive over the policy of placating pro-immigrant groups, which could land the administration in trouble. The Republicans are already planning to flip the House in the 2022 midterm elections by banking on the Biden administration’s immigration policy.
“You just can't say, ‘Yeah, yeah, let everybody in’ — because then we’re affected down there at the border,” Cuellar told Axios.
Though the Biden administration has stopped short of calling the border situation a crisis, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on March 8 wrote to his staff seeking volunteers for a “Volunteer Force” to help the Customs and Border Protection at the border as it has faced an “overwhelming numbers” of migrants. Even the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which normally deals with big-scale emergencies and natural disasters, has been roped in to aid the care for the growing number of migrant minors at the southern border.