Treviño, Cornyn, offer markedly different views on President Biden’s pending visit to Brownsville

BROWNSVILLE, Texas – Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño, Jr., a former mayor of Brownsville and immediate past president of the Texas Border Coalition, has spoken about President Biden’s pending appearance in the Rio Grande Valley.

Biden is slated to meet with local elected officials and law enforcement personnel during a visit to Brownsville on Thursday. There, he is expected to announce new border security initiatives.

Treviño said:

 “First, I would thank President Biden for his leadership and what it means to Cameron County: new infrastructure projects at the international bridge, the port, the highways and causeways, and funding for healthcare, broadband, and workforce training.

“Cameron County and the Texas Border Coalition strongly support your border supplemental request for more Customs inspectors, Border Patrol, immigration judges, new asylum officers, grants for migrant shelter and services, and deployment of more equipment at the ports of entry to detect smuggled drugs and people. We have been advocating for those things for more than a decade.”

El Paso County Commissioner David Stout, the current president of TBC said:

“To achieve the kind of success desired by the American people, we can no longer only invest in deterrence-only strategies and must be serious about meaningful immigration policies reflecting economic and social reality; for example, the bipartisan Dignity Act, which includes increasing pathways to legal entry like expanding work visas, especially for agricultural work, giving permanent relief to the Dreamers, and asylum reform that doesn’t gut the asylum system. Texas border communities are thriving, safe cities and counties.”

Stout continued: “We appreciate the investment by this Administration in El Paso and other border ports, and now seek solutions to national problems involving immigration and border management that are on our front doorsteps. Too many elected leaders have looked at these challenges and have seen partisan political opportunities instead of the bipartisan solutions they can be. Ours is a nascent success story that needs to be built upon to achieve our local, state, and national goals.”

TBC is a collective voice of border mayors, county judges, and economic development commissions focused on issues that affect 2.8 million people along the Texas-Mexico border region and economically disadvantaged counties from El Paso to Brownsville. TBC works closely with state and federal government to educate, advocate, and secure funding for transportation, immigration and border security, workforce development, economic development, and health care. 

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn works closely with Judge Treviño and TBC on many issues. However, he had a markedly different view on Biden’s visit. Speaking from the floor of the Senate, Cornyn said:

“Tomorrow, President Biden will do something he’s done only once before in his term as President of the United States: He’ll travel to the U.S.-Mexico border, to Brownsville, Texas, in an attempt to address his biggest political liability.

“As usual, the President refuses to accept any responsibility.

“The same laws that were in effect during President Trump’s administration are still in effect during President Biden’s administration, with far different outcomes.

“Given everything we’ve witnessed over the last three years, President Biden has no right – no right – to claim that his hands are tied when it comes to addressing the border crisis by executive action. From day one, President Biden made clear that he was willing to use executive action.

“He’s used executive action to remove border wall construction, the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy; halt deportations, excluding broad classes of migrants from removal; parole more than 1.6 million migrants in the United States; and so much more. So this is a crisis of President Biden’s making.

“He can fix it, just like he broke it.

“News reports are that President Biden could announce new executive actions on his trip to the border tomorrow. I’m eager to see whether he will reverse course and issue an executive order that will actually tighten the border, will actually do his duty of securing the border, or whether these are measures more designed to loosen immigration policy.”

The post Treviño, Cornyn, offer markedly different views on President Biden’s pending visit to Brownsville appeared first on Rio Grande Guardian.