Listen to “Congressional Border Battles” on Spreaker.
The House and Senate will need to reconcile vastly different bills designed to provide billions of dollars in emergency aid for the humanitarian crisis building on our southern border.
On Wednesday, The Senate rejected legislation passed by House Democrats and approved its own $4.6 billion measure. House Democrats say the Senate bill is a non-starter.
While the two chambers head to the reconciliation process, Florida Rep. Ted Yoho says lawmakers cannot embrace what he considers an abandonment of law enforcement personnel along the border.
“It limits the authority of the Department of Homeland Security to surge employees at the border. [The House bill] cuts overtime hours cuts overtime for the exhausted officers that we have working overtime. They want to cut this. These are the very people doing what we hired them to do,” said Yoho.
Yoho says Democrats also want to cut funding for the National Guard at the border and voted down funding for enhanced border technology that could not only detect illegal entry into the country but also protect migrants from sexual assault and trafficking by drug cartels.
He says the partisan bickering on this issue needs to stop.
“The border crisis is not a political crisis. Well, it is a political crisis because Congress has failed to act. But we should not be Republicans or Democrats. We should come together to have a border security bill that solves this problem,” said Yoho.
“If we were doing what we were supposed to with border security and enforced the laws on the books, we wouldn’t have a crisis down there,” said Yoho.
Listen to the full podcast to hear Yoho discuss whether the House and Senate can find common ground in the border funding bill. He also details why he believes the Freedom Caucus deserves credit for forcing a fight on this issue and how his forthcoming bill to reform policy for immigrant workers in the agriculture, hospitality, and construction sectors can help address the larger need for immigration reform.
