Harry Reid Criticizes GOP Plan Because Illegal Aliens Are Here ‘Legitimately’
FILE
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has made some
ridiculous claims about the ongoing border crisis over the past week. On
Tuesday, he told reporters that despite the thousands of illegal
immigrants flowing into the country, he is certain the U.S.-Mexico
border is secure. Reid then told fellow lawmakers that illegal immigrants who entered the country as minors did, in fact, come here legally.
Reid’s remarks came on the Senate floor Thursday in response to a
demand from Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) that the Barack Obama
Administration make drastic changes to its immigration policy.
The Texas Republican has asked lawmakers to oppose Obama’s request
for $3.7 billion in emergency funding to deal with the border crisis
unless language is included in the appropriations bill to halt the
President’s 2012 order halting deportations of the illegal immigrant
minors affectionately called Dreamers by the White House.
”What is causing this humanitarian crisis is that these children
believe that they will be granted, in the future, amnesty. So this
legislation directly solves that problem,” Cruz told reporters Thursday.
“The only way to address this humanitarian crisis and to solve it, so
we don’t have children being brutalized, is to remove the promise of
amnesty that is causing these children to risk their lives and be
entrusted to vicious drug dealers.”
Reid took the lead in Democratic attacks on Cruz’s proposed end to Obama’s amnesty.
“Before Republicans help our Border Patrol agents and all the
personnel trying to do something to handle this humanitarian crisis,
they want President Obama to deport the Dreamers who are already here,
legitimately here,” Reid said on the Senate floor.
“What the junior senator from Texas (Cruz) said (is) we’re not going
to do this unless we deport all these children who came here before, the
so-called Dreamers,” Reid continued. “Once again we see there are no
substantive solutions being offered by the Republican Party. Instead of
doing something about these children who are at the border, they want to
deport hundreds of thousands of the people who are already here.”
The argument between the two lawmakers indicated that polarization in
Congress is making it increasingly unlikely that a legislative fix to
the immigration crisis is forthcoming. Unfortunately for conservatives,
many Democratic lawmakers have begun hinting that the President will
attempt to tackle the problem unilaterally — a move that would likely
include amnesty for hundreds of thousands of the so-called Dreamers and
their family members.
“It’s important to understand that the president made it very clear
to the Hispanic Caucus yesterday that Congress is not acting,”
California Democrat Tony Cardenas told
MSNBC Wednesday. “He let
Speaker Boehner know many, many months ago to please go ahead and do
something. He has not done it. And now’s the time for the president to
act, and the president’s going to act shortly.”
The lawmaker said the President will use his executive “legal
authority and latitude” to “give people some kind of status to the 11
million who are waiting to get some relief.”
“Not all of them,” he continued. “The power of the President cannot
relieve all 11 million. But there are categories of 500,000 or a million
that he can give some kind of temporary status to.”
Al-Arabiya
“Christian families are on their way to Dohuk and Arbil,” in the
neighboring autonomous region of Kurdistan, Patriarch Louis Sako told
AFP. “For the first time in the history of Iraq, Mosul is now empty of
Christians.”
