As Illegal Alien Encounters Surge, GOP Senators Push Border Security Bill

September 21, 2023 Immigration

Illegal alien encounters on America’s southern border approached record highs between Friday and Monday.

In just four days, Customs and Border Protection has encountered more than 35,000 illegal aliens on the U.S. border with Mexico, according to Fox News reporter Bill Melugin.

When you do the math, “that’s almost 9,000 every single day,” Melugin reported Tuesday.

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“Biden’s open borders are an invitation for the cartels to brutalize children, to assault women, to overrun our communities with illegal aliens, and to flood this country with narcotics and fentanyl that kill over 100,000 people per year,” Cruz said in a statement.

“This bill would stop the Biden Border Crisis dead in its tracks by building the wall, ratcheting up asylum standards, increasing the number of Border Patrol agents, and implementing effective border security policies,” the Texas lawmaker added.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, announced his support for the Secure the Border Act in a statement Tuesday, saying, “Every state in the nation, including Iowa, is now a border state,” adding that “border security is national security.”

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If passed by the Senate and signed into law, the 211-page bill would address the border crisis, according to Cruz’s office, by:

* Requiring the Department of Homeland Security to resume border wall construction.
* Increasing the number of Border Patrol agents.
* Tightening asylum standards by restricting asylum to only aliens who present themselves at ports of entry and by requiring aliens to prove they are “more likely than not” to qualify for their asylum claim.
* Narrowing DHS’s power to unilaterally grant parole to illegal aliens.
*Criminalizing visa overstays by making the first offense a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $1,000 fine and the second offense a felony punishable by up to a $2,000 fine and up to two years’ imprisonment.
* Stopping nongovernmental organizations from using tax dollars to transport or lodge illegal aliens and provide illegal aliens with lawyers.
* Restricting DHS from using its CBP One app to welcome illegal aliens into the country.
* Requiring employers to use E-Verify.
* Ensuring that CBP has access to the criminal history databases of all countries of origin and transit so that CBP is aware of the criminal history of illegal aliens encountered at the southern border.