WASHINGTON – Congressman Troy Carter said Tuesday that his trip to the Mexican border this past weekend showed him that the problem of immigrants sneaking into the country without proper documentation won’t be solved until Democrats and Republicans stop using immigration as a political weapon against each other.
“This is a major, major problem and to fix it, we have to do it together,” Carter said upon his return after a couple of days on the border.
“If you really want to fix immigration, we need to talk,” Carter said of representatives who often pitch battle over immigration policies. “We can’t get on the same page because of politics.”
Carter, who represents much of New Orleans and parts of Baton Rouge, joined fellow Democratic members of the House Committee on Homeland Security on a tour by the U.S. Border Patrol of the Mexican border near Brownsville and McAllen, Texas.
He said the Custom and Border Protection’s Office of Field Operations, Homeland Security Investigations, and the CBP Air and Marine Operations had a wide range of technology. One machine can X-ray a passing vehicle to locate anomalies that could be drugs or hidden travelers. He noted that the Border Patrol had so many drones in the air that they got in the way of their helicopter tour of the pathways through heavy foliage in Mexico leading to the Rio Grande River, the international boundary with the U.S. in Texas.
“We see the walls, the military type tactics, and none of these things work,” Carter said, noting that improper border crossings and illegal drug smuggling have been issues on the Texas border for generations. “How do we secure the border if we don’t have immigration reform? It all goes together.”
Carter said he was surprised by the long lines on both sides of the border of workers and shoppers crossing to the other side as well as people seeking asylum. Added to that are the people who are sneaking in illegally.
But Carter said he also heard from employees of immigration and border security agencies that they are understaffed and overworked processing those crossing with the proper documentation.
“Most migrants coming to our border have no other legal pathway to U.S. citizenship and are here seeking asylum – which is their legal right. However, our system was not set up for the kind of volume we are experiencing, and it is unsustainable,” Carter said.
Carter and the other Homeland Security committee Democrats left for Brownsville after a committee hearing last week turned into GOP tongue lashings of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over immigration policy.
During the April 19 hearing, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Rome, Ga., slandered a Democratic Homeland committee colleague with unsubstantiated claims that he had slept with a Chinese spy and then called Mayorkas a liar.
Lafayette Republican Rep. Clay Higgins, who also is on the committee, accused Mayorkas of allowing Mexican criminal cartels to kill 225,000 Americans with smuggled fentanyl and “herding teenage girls into prostitution sex slave networks.”
Higgins didn’t ask any questions of Mayorkas, but he did scold the secretary. “It’s shameful what you brought upon our country,” Higgins said.
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