Texas Congressman Vicente Gonzalez discusses pressure on border towns as Title 42 ends
Interview
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Thank you.
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We have done a lot of work in preparing.
The Border Patrol has got a staging center. CBP has done all they can to get ready. We have done -- the NGOs in the area, Catholic Charities and others, have done a lot of work in preparation of a massive surge coming to our border.
But I have to say, we could never be prepared enough. And I wish we had another 30 days to build out more infrastructure. And I think we need to also work with countries like Guatemala and Mexico to do their share in slowing the migration. And coming up with ideas where we can process migrants far away from our Southern border.
As you may know, I have been pushing the Safe Zones Act, which does just that. It creates zones in Guatemala and Panama and Colombia and other countries where migrants can ask for asylum at that juncture. And if they're going to ultimately be led in under the credible fear standard, which we now use on the Southern border, we should allow them to fly to their -- to fly to their destination.
And it does two things. It takes the pressure off the border and allows the Border Patrol and law enforcement to do their job and what they have been trained to do, and it eliminates a lot of the cartels out of the equation that are charging thousands of dollars for these migrants to come to the Southern border.
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Well, this is -- they can go to a neighboring country or another country.
The vast majority of people who are asking for asylum on our Southern border is because of poverty. And a lot of them have been consumed into the economy of Mexico and other countries that they have -- that they have trekked through. Their goal is to ultimately get to the United States.
And I definitely understand it. And -- but we need to do it in an orderly and humane way. Forcing people to walk thousands of miles through Mexico and struggle with cartels and get extorted is not really humane. And I think we need to build infrastructure far away from our border, and, ultimately, if we're going to -- if we're going to allow asylum seekers into the country, allow them in from that juncture.
Yes, I mean, it's the most orderly, humane and safe way we could do it.
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I think our asylum laws are antiquated.
And they're 70 years on the books. And they don't really adapt to the days that we're living now. We have -- ultimately, we have people from all over the world coming to our Southern border asking for asylum. And small communities like McAllen and Brownsville in Weslaco and Laredo and even El Paso don't have them resources to act as the federal government would.
And we don't have massive staging centers for potentially hundreds of thousands of people showing up at once.
I had a conversation with the president of Guatemala a few days ago. I know there's about 20,000 or 30,000 people holding up on the other side of the border now. There's about 60,000 making their way here. And there's approximately, they say -- he told me there was about 200,000 coming through Central America that -- through the Darien area in Colombia and Panama.
That is a massive amount of people that, if they all showed up at one time, I don't know that we would have the resources in place and infrastructure in place to deal with it properly.
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Yes.
So, our hearts and prayers have gone out to the families of the eight Venezuelans, and the 10 who have been injured who were casualties of the confusion and overstressed area along the border right now. There is nothing to show that this was a hate crime or that it -- that it was any anything other than an accident.
Apparently, the driver might have been on -- under the influence of alcohol or drugs. So that's the information I'm getting. I don't believe it was intentional. And we're still listening to border -- to law enforcement reports that are coming out. But that's the last report that I received, that it looks like it was just a tragic accident.
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Thank you.
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