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Vulnerable Democrats running in tight midterm races will not say if they oppose amnesty for migrants who entered the U.S. illegally through the southern border.
Fox News Digital reached out to over two dozen Democratic members, asking if they would oppose efforts to provide a pathway to citizenship for all the illegal migrants currently residing in the United States.
More than 200,000 migrants came through the border in August alone, and border officials encountered over 2 million people crossing into the U.S. this fiscal year. After the record number of crossings, none of the Democrats answered whether they believe millions of migrants in the U.S. should be granted amnesty.
Vice President Kamala Harris recently claimed that the border was secure and blamed the administration under former President Trump for the current state of the immigration system.
Migrants gather to received donated clothes near a bus station after being released from U.S. Border Patrol custody in El Paso, Texas. (Jose Luis Gonzalez)
“The border is secure. We also have a broken immigration system, in particular, over the last four years before we came in, and it needs to be fixed,” Harris, who is in charge of addressing the “root causes” of the crisis at the border, told NBC News.
Last week, Fox News Digital asked the same set of vulnerable Democrats if they believed the border was secure, receiving only one response from one House member who lives in a border state.
“My message remains the same. The border is not secure, and we need to be doing more to dissuade migrants from coming to the United States,” Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, told Fox News Digital.
Illegal immigrants arrive at Martha’s Vineyard Airport on Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2022. (Video obtained by Fox News)
The border crisis and the influx of illegal migrants coming into the U.S. received renewed attention Wednesday, after Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., sent a plane full of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, a well-known vacation spot for the wealthy.
Despite DeSantis assuring that the migrants voluntarily traveled to the beach town, several Democrats were not pleased with his move. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., blasted the GOP governor, calling it a form of “kidnapping,” while Hillary Clinton compared it to “human trafficking.”
President Biden, who has not yet visited the southern border since taking office in 2021, addressed the move of the illegal migrants to Martha’s Vineyard at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute gala.
A record number of illegal migrants have entered through the southern border. (John Moore)
“Republicans are playing politics with human beings, using them as props. What they’re doing is simply wrong, it’s un-American, it’s reckless,” Biden said Thursday.
“The Biden-Harris administration continues ignoring and denying the historic crisis at our southern border, which has endangered and overwhelmed Texas communities for almost two years,” Gov. Greg Abbott, D-Texas., who has been redirecting migrants from his border state to Democrat-run cities such as New York City, Chicago and Washington D.C., said in a statement last week.
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DeSantis also addressed the backlash from the media and stressed that Florida “take[s] what’s happening at the southern border very seriously, unlike some, and unlike the President of the United States, who has refused to lift a finger to secure that border.”
Fox News’ Lawrence Richard contributed to this report.