John Cornyn: “Now, Mr. President, to talk about what I came here to talk about--talk about the border. I live in a border State. We…”

“Now, Mr. President, to talk about what I came here to talk about--talk about the border. I live in a border State. We have 1,200 miles of border with Mexico. We have, as a country, 2,000 miles of border with Mexico. And we are seeing numbers of people showing up at the border that we have never seen before--millions of people since President Biden was sworn in as President on January 20, 2021, millions of people showing up, many of whom are claiming asylum and seeking to immigrate permanently into the United States under the asylum laws. Because the administration has a policy of releasing those individuals into the interior of the United States to await a future immigration court hearing, which may be years in the future because of backlog, many of those individuals do not show up at their immigration court hearing but simply are willing to play the odds that they can just melt into the Great American heartland and not be returned or repatriated to their country of origin or actually have to appear at an asylum hearing. We know that, statistically, the number of people who actually do show up for an asylum hearing in front of an immigration judge, only roughly 90 percent of them fail to meet the very stringent requirement for asylum, which is basically a credible fear of persecution based on some classification: race, sex, ethnic origin, or the like. That is a very narrow test, and it certainly does not include fear of poverty or even violence in your home country.…”