Democratic Lawmaker Calls For ‘Expedited Hearings And Expedited Removals’
As the number of illegal border crossings continues to break new records under the Biden administration, even many Democrats — particularly in border states — are beginning to call for stricter enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws.
U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX) added his name to that expanding group this week during an appearance on CNN.
Texas has been experiencing the brunt of the border crisis in recent years, prompting Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to implement a series of new laws and strategies aimed at stemming the tide of illegal immigration.
Gonzalez signaled his endorsement of at least some of those policies, although he took the opportunity to denounce Abbott’s overall agenda.
“We need ideas of processing migrants further away from the border,” the lawmaker said. “We need to raise the critical fear standard on the border. We need to have expedited hearings and expedited removals.”
He went on to call on his own party to take the lead on an issue that the current White House has essentially ignored thus far.
“We need to crack down on the southern border and Democrats need to do it,” Gonzalez said. “And I think there [are] a lot of places where we can create good policy that’s effective and it’s humane. We’re not going to rip children out of mothers’ arms and separate families the way President Trump did, but we need to have law and order on the border and we need to have an orderly process for people to migrate into this country.”
The Texas Democrat concluded with a pitch for the Safe Zones Act, a proposal he introduced in April, asserting that it “develops zones in Guatemala and Panama and maybe Colombia for migrants to go and [be processed] at that juncture.”
Other Democrats in Texas, across the southern border and beyond have begun taking state- and local-level steps to bring down the number of undocumented migrants crossing into the United States.
Democratic Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, for example, took a page from Abbott’s playbook recently when she approved a measure to dispatch state National Guard troops to support law enforcement efforts to secure the border.
