President Joe Biden is facing dueling calls from Democrat lawmakers over whether he should take action to secure the southern border or push for amnesty for illegal immigrants, all while the issue becomes more contentious in the lead up to the November election.
A letter from 19 Democrat Senators in late March, including Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), John Fetterman (D-PA), and Tammy Duckworth (D-WI), urged the Democrat incumbent to push for amnesty for illegal immigrants earlier this year, but the party appears to be split over how to handle the crucial election year issue.
“Deporting all such individuals — as former President Donald Trump has threatened to do if reelected — would devastate the American economy and destroy American families,” the Democrats claim before going on to add, “streamlining pathways for undocumented immigrants with no criminal history and deep ties to the United States to obtain parole or a lawful immigration status would provide stability to their families, require them to pay taxes, and to check in with the U.S. government regularly.”
The letter calling for amnesty for illegal immigrants came in the midst of the worst border crisis that America has ever seen, with over 9.5 million nationwide encounters and 1.7 million estimated illegal immigrant gotaways being recorded during Biden’s term.
Democrats in the House of Representatives, however, took a different tone when 15 of them signed a letter to Biden this week calling on him to “immediately take further action to restore order at the Southern border and fix our broken immigration system.” The signatories included several Congressmen from battleground states, including Reps. Susan Wild and Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania and Reps. Susie Lee and Steven Horsford of Nevada. “All of our constituents, no matter our congressional district, have felt the impacts of the current border situation,” the Democrats wrote in their letter to the president.
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Communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee Jack Pandol blasted the letter as an act of political theater, contending that “extreme Democrats play Lucy with the football every election year – promising to lock down the border after opening the floodgates the year before.”
“It’s a pathetic charade that says more about Democrats’ political freakout over their open borders policies than it does about their willingness to end the crisis.” Pandol went on to say.
The shifting tone of Democrats on the border could be the result of a mounting number of polls finding that voters are increasingly critical of Biden’s performance on the southern border, potentially posing a threat to his reelection chances. One recent poll, performed by ABC/Ipsos, found that Americans trust former President Donald Trump to handle immigration more than they trust Biden by a whopping 17 point margin.
The poll was just one of the several surveys that could spell trouble for the Democrat incumbent. Another one found that only 36 percent of voters approve of Biden’s performance on immigration, making it his lowest issue-specific approval rating for four consecutive months, while two more polls have found that the majority of respondents approve of the deportation of illegal immigrants.
