Brooks: Current GOP border bill is a sham, 'nothing substantive is being done'

WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL5) on Thursday joined his Alabama colleague Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) in harshly criticizing a border security bill being sponsored by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Tx.).

McCaul says the bill aims to complete fencing along the southern border and would require new biometric identity security measures to be implemented at all points of entry into the U.S. by 2020.

The Texas congressman called the bill “the most significant and toughest border security bill ever set before Congress” and said it would achieve “operational control” of heavily trafficked areas along the border within two years and lock down the entire border within five.

Rep. Brooks’ assessment of the bill was decidedly different than that sponsor’s.

This bill “is a show horse, not a work horse,” Brooks said, “and as such it is an effort to convince the American people that we are doing something substantive to secure the border when in fact nothing substantive is being done.”

Sen. Sessions, who has become the leading conservative voice in the Senate on immigration matters in recent years, was just as strong in his criticism, but more specific.

“The Chairman McCaul proposal does not include the following reforms needed to achieve a sound immigration system,” he began. “It does not end catch-and-release; it does not require mandatory detention and return; it does not include worksite enforcement; it does not close dangerous asylum and national security loopholes; it does not cut-off access to federal welfare; and it does not require completion of the border fence. Surprisingly, it delays and weakens the longstanding unfulfilled statutory requirement for a biometric entry-exit visa tracking system.”

Biometric identification methods like fingerprinting and facial recognition create an ePassport that renders traditional methods of passport and visa fraud obsolete. Over 80 countries now use ePassport programs to more accurately track individuals entering and leaving their borders, while the United States has lagged behind.

Advocates for the McCaul legislation say House Republican leadership’s plan is to pass multiple bills addressing various immigration issues. And although the McCaul bill focuses strictly on the border, which is the immigration concern that most clearly falls under his committee’s jurisdiction, they believe it is a move in the right direction.

It passed out of the House Homeland Security Committee Wednesday along party lines, with all of the committee’s Republicans voting in favor of it while Democrats opposed.

As the McCaul bill moved on to the full House for debate and a vote sometime next week, border security officials blasted the legislation and called the Obama administration’s current immigration policies a “global joke.”

“Chairman McCaul’s legislation does nothing to preclude anyone in the world from turning themselves in at the US border and obtaining automatic entry and federal benefits,” said Kenneth Palinkas, who leads the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) personnel union. “Almost anyone at all can call themselves an asylum-seeker and get in; it’s a global joke… The bill also delays by years the implementation of biometric exit-entry to police the rising overstay catastrophe… We are saying to Congress: help us. Provide us the tools, mission support and resources we need to protect the Homeland, in accord with the laws and Constitution of the United States.”