BROWNSVILLE, TEXAS—A Republican Senate delegation visiting the southern border Thursday blamed President Joe Biden for causing the worst immigration crisis in the nation’s history, just hours before the end of Title 42.
"The nation needs to see this. This is why President Joe Biden needs to come and look at these camps and see it for himself," said Sen. Roger Marshall (R., Kansas), at a Border Patrol outpost neighboring the Rio Grande.
Marshall, along with Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas), Ted Budd (N.C.), and John Hoeven (N.D.), toured the Camp Monument border patrol outpost, which was once a public golf course. During their visit, hundreds of aliens were transported by immigration authorities to be released into the interior of the United States.
The visit was meant to bring further attention to the unprecedented border crisis. Border Patrol apprehended more than 30,000 aliens since Monday, the largest three-day number ever recorded.
But those numbers are expected to get worse on Friday after the end of Title 42, a public health measure that allowed law enforcement to quickly deport aliens. Southern border crossings could reach more than 14,000 a day for weeks, if not months, according to federal estimates.
"This is deliberate. This is a decision that was made by President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and Congressional Democrats to open up the border to what is nothing less than an invasion," Cruz said.
The four senators unanimously blamed the Biden administration for the problem. Simple solutions, they said, such as the "Remain in Mexico" policy, would dramatically curtail illegal border crossings. "Remain in Mexico," officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, was a policy instituted by former president Donald Trump that forced aliens to wait in Mexico before their immigration court hearing in the United States.
The White House has acknowledged that the upcoming flood of aliens could throw the southern border into disarray. Biden said Tuesday that the end of Title 42 will make the U.S.-Mexico border "chaotic for a while," and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas privately admitted last month that the policy change will "strain our workforce, our communities, and our entire system."
The Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday ordered immigration authorities to release aliens from custody without a court date. Senior Border Patrol officials said the move raises serious security concerns, as there is little, if any, way to monitor the location of those aliens.
Hoeven agreed with that assessment. The Homeland Security directive, he said, only means aliens will be released into the country at a faster rate.
"What’s happening is our ability to process [illegal border crossers] is just getting faster. We’re processing more and more but it’s just resulting in more and more people coming illegally," Hoeven said. "It’s just resulting in more and more people coming illegally."
Border Patrol agents warned the Republican senators that the high number of illegal border crossings will make it easier for Mexican cartels to smuggle drugs, such as fentanyl, into the United States. In some hundred-mile-plus swaths of the southern border, according to a Border Patrol agent who spoke with the Washington Free Beacon, only four agents are on patrol while the rest perform administrative tasks.
"This used to be a bipartisan issue, but in the last several years, President Joe Biden has politicized it," said Budd. "He’s let this issue lay dormant. It’s just gotten worse and worse."