US asylum policies need to be changed to combat illegal immigration: Border & Commerce Security Council president
Democrats are fighting back against the Defense Department’s plan to shift up to a billion dollars in military funds to pay for 57 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, calling it “unbelievably irresponsible.” This comes as U.S. Customs and Border Protection says America has hit a breaking point at the border after the Border Patrol “recorded more than 3,700 apprehensions along the Southwest Border [Monday]—the largest single day total in more than a decade.”
In an interview on “Making Money with Charles Payne” Border and Commerce Security Council president Nelson Balido said Congress and the media have been ignoring the illegal immigration issue for too long.
“People aren’t looking at the numbers, they’re not reporting the numbers and Congress hasn’t really cared…you just gotta look at the numbers,” he said on Wednesday. Balido added that the large influx of people at the border is made up of migrants who are looking to seek asylum in the United States.
“Three thousand people were claiming asylum in March of 2018. When we were talking in November 2018, it was thirty thousand and now it’s one hundred thousand.”
As of July 2018, “there were over 733,000 pending immigration cases and the average wait time for an immigration hearing was 721 days,” according to the National Immigration Forum and TRAC Immigration. While Balido feels a border wall is necessary to combat illegal immigration, he said asylum reform is an important first step to solving the issue.
“The asylum situation is only getting worse…nearly one hundred thousand people are flowing over that border on a monthly basis now and certainly no wall or any other gadget is going to stop that because the issue there is that we need to pressure Mexico and the Central American governments to do their part and our Congress needs to do their part to ensure that we have an asylum reform that makes absolute sense to stop this illegal flow of people over this border,” he said.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX BUSINESS APP
Balido said asylum reform “has to start simply with if you want to come to this country there’s a legal way to do that" and that "there has to be a way that we return these people…we need to send people back that arrive to the border in an illegal situation and have them apply the normal and legal way of coming to this country.”
The Department of Defense’s plan comes just a day after the House failed to override President Trump's veto by a vote of 248-181 after both chambers of Congress sought to overturn his national emergency declaration.