President-elect Joe Biden is expected to reveal a broad immigration plan during his early days in office, which will aim to reverse Trump-era policies – but his proactive approach is getting resistance from both sides of the corridor.
Biden’s plan must follow campaign promises through a deportation moratorium, providing a multi-year path to citizenship and preventing the use of federal emergency funds from being diverted to the expansion of the southern border wall.
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But Senator Tom Cotton, R-Ark., Took to Twitter to express his frustration on a long topic of seven tweets on Monday, saying that Biden would prioritize “amnesty before the pandemic”.
Although Biden has already announced his intention to ask Congress to approve a nearly $ 2 trillion plan that would allow direct payments to individuals, vaccine boosters and community assistance – Cotton said his problems with Biden’s immigration project are health and safety implications.
The Arkansas junior senator claimed that Biden would “immediately undo the closure of the pandemic border” and threaten the United States’ health security by allowing migrants to re-enter the country.
“[I]is what you would expect from the open borders party: total amnesty, no regard for the health or safety of Americans and no oversight, “he wrote in a series of tweets.
“The lack of tests and controls at the border will mean a huge increase in the spread of the virus,” he continued.
Biden based several of his first 100 days on central office policies around the deadly pandemic, but Fox News was unable to contact his transition team to confirm how he plans to address the reopening of borders while maintaining control over the virus. .
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But even Biden’s immigration plan, which Cotton called “the most radical immigration bill in American history,” has been rejected by Democrats who want more immediate reforms.
One element of the plan establishes an eight-year path to citizenship for about 11 million people.
But while Cotton said that such a policy was unfair to “law-abiding immigrants who followed the rules,” members of Congress like Congressman Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said they would push for legislation to deal with accelerated citizenship for immigrants who worked on the front lines during the pandemic with a five-year plan.
“These are people who feed us, clean our homes and hospitals and offices … and do all this while living in fear of deportation, exploitation and now of this pandemic,” Castro said in a press release on Friday, reported by news site, HuffPost.
The proposal would affect about five million immigrants who continued to work in industries that do not allow them to work at home, such as agriculture and slaughterhouses, the publication said.
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Other Democrats have expressed concern that the plan will not drive a comprehensive agenda, but will try to address different immigration issues in a “correspondence” approach.
“The government has a very limited window of opportunity before members of the House begin to run for re-election,” Representative Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, first year representative of the Hispanic Caucus Congress told Politico. “Every day that passes is a day when the window closes an inch more.”
“We have to do this at once,” she added.
Escobar was not immediately found by Fox News.
Adam Shaw contributed to this report.