Rep. Mike Levin: “Congress needs to get out of its own way and work together.”
“I’m ready to get back to work, and I know my colleagues are as well.”
With another visit to the Campo Border Patrol station under his belt, Mike Levin is ready to keep doing everything he can to solve the border crisis.
And while his joint letter to Biden calls the president’s new executive action enforcing background checks a “positive step” — Levin knows there’s still more to be done.
Here’s what Southern California residents are hearing about Congressman Levin’s work:
Rep. Mike Levin: I’m at the Campo Border Patrol station in East County San Diego, and the first thing I want to say is that there’s a tremendous amount of credit due to the men and women who serve in the border patrol. They are overwhelmed, and I saw that first thing today.
It’s an untenable situation, and it is a crisis that we have to deal with not on a bipartisan basis, but on a nonpartisan basis. This is a matter of national security.
I will do whatever I can to convince any of my colleagues. Far too many on both sides of the aisle use the issue of immigration or border security as a wedge during election years to score political points. That’s just flat wrong.
Congress needs to get out of its own way and work together. We came very close. Unfortunately, Mike Johnson wouldn’t move forward when former President Trump told him to kill the deal, and that’s an unbelievable shame.
I’m ready to get back to work, and I know my colleagues are as well.
Rep. Mike Levin: It is unfortunate that former President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson sabotaged a strong bipartisan border security bill from becoming law, to instead play politics with border security to score political points during an election year.
I am also concerned that given the reality of Congressional inaction, President Biden isn’t using all the tools at his disposal to better address security at the Southern border, interdict illicit fentanyl, and allow for orderly legal immigration. That’s why I joined with more than a dozen of my Democratic colleagues to write the President last week requesting he take further executive action.
These issues are personal to me as the grandson of Mexican immigrants on my mother’s side who came here last century searching for a better life. My grandparents worked hard, played by the rules, and achieved the American dream that enabled their children to succeed. Now, their youngest grandson is a United States Congressman.
As policymakers, we can either use the issue of immigration to selfishly fortify our political agendas or instead work together to ensure legal immigration complements border security in a genuine way that improves the situation in the short- and long-term.
Rep. Mike Levin: I’m speaking to you just after visiting our Border Patrol agents at the Campo Border Patrol station out in East County, San Diego. I can tell you that since our letter from just a number of days ago, I was encouraged to see the president’s executive action giving Border Patrol agents the ability to deport those immigrants who don’t pass a background check.
What we need is to get back to the negotiating table and the bipartisan border security bill that had been negotiated a couple of months back by Senator Murphy, Lankford and Sinema.
We need more than just enforcement. We need pathways to citizenship for immigrants who’ve been living in the country for a long time. We need work permits for our DREAMers, and the other thing that’s very clear is we’ve got to hire more Border Patrol. The good news is in the new fiscal year ’24 budget, there is money to hire up to 22,000 Border Patrol agents, which is up from about 16,000 now.
It’s really important to understand there are a whole host of Democrats and Republicans who are tired of the partisanship around this issue. They are tired of people using hatred and fear to talk about immigrants and really to embolden the worst instincts of people and their extremism by doing so.
Nobody should be playing politics with border security. It is a national security issue. It is a nonpartisan issue, and people who would score political points are doing a disservice to their constituents and to our national security.
We need to ensure there are safe legal ways for people to migrate into the U.S. We’re also making it harder to come here illegally, and we need to provide a pathway to citizenship for those who meet the qualifications for those who pass the background check and who pay taxes. That’s what America has been and can be again if we’re willing to come together and actually fix the broken immigration system, as opposed to playing politics with it.
