Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) said Tuesday that “we must eliminate funding” for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Department of Homeland Security, arguing that the agencies “terrorize migrant communities.”
“Time after time we have seen it as advocates on the ground, as human service agencies on the ground. To continue to see over and over again that these agencies are inept to humanely guiding migrants through our immigration system,” the progressive congresswoman said during a conversation on digital walls, borders and deportations with Julie Mao from Just Futures Law.
“Instead they further continue to terrorize migrant communities located within our communities,” she said.
Tlaib’s comments come just weeks after a bipartisan group of lawmakers from Texas penned an essay in the Dallas Morning News warning that the U.S. is on track to receive “the highest number of total yearly border crossings in two decades.”
The essay, co-authored by Republican Senator John Cornyn, Republican Representative Tony Gonzales and Democratic Representative Henry Cuellar, noted nearly 930,000 migrants including “almost 80,000 unaccompanied children” have illegally crossed the border into America in the past 8 months.
However, despite the ongoing crisis at the southern border, Tlaib blasted the Biden administration last month after Vice President Kamala Harris said during a news conference with the Guatemalan president that she wanted “to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come.”
“This whole ‘stay there and die’ approach is not how our country will promote a more humane and just immigration system,” Tlaib wrote in a tweet at the time.