The border crisis ravaging our nation is once again shaping up to be at the center of congressional debate — though the battle lines are not as clean as one might expect. House leadership recently signaled that legislation could soon come to the floor in April to curb the onslaught of illegal immigration at the southern border. Every House Republican in the Texas delegation, except one, has rallied around Rep. Chip Roy’s H.R. 29 to fix asylum loopholes and reimplement the “turn away” authority necessary to restore some semblance of sanity.
Left-leaning Rep. Tony Gonzales is the lone Texas Republican holdout.
Gonzales has effectively declared political war on his own conference and voters. He first falsely maligned the Roy bill as legislation that would ban “all asylum claims” and more recently, tagged the asylum reform bill as an “unchristian anti-immigrant bill.” Gonzales has declared that if the bill is brought to the House floor, he will be forced to vote “no” on the debt ceiling.
In reality, the bill provides for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to hold illegal immigrants in custody while they are in expedited removal proceedings, or to keep potential immigrants in Mexico while their asylum claims are being adjudicated. If DHS refuses to detain illegal immigrants, the bill mandates that immigrants be turned away at the border in a manner almost identical to Title 42 public health authority.
In other words, the legislation returns to Trump-era border security policies that succeeded in significantly curbing illegal
