In order to get around the fact that President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) doesn’t strictly follow federal immigration law, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has put forward a plan that would let states remove illegal immigrants and help build walls along the border between the US and Mexico.
Hawley introduced the “State Border Defense Act” this week. This bill would, among other things, let each state remove illegal immigrants that they locate.
“They’ve taken over our southern border. The situation is getting worse every day because of Joe Biden’s risky open-border policies, and states like Missouri have to deal with the results,” Hawley said in a statement.
Additionally, the bill would allow states to pay for building actual walls across the southern border. States will also be able to go after illegal immigrants for the crimes they’re committing because they cross the border.
“States should be permitted to enforce immigration rules if the federal government is unwilling to do so,” according to Hawley.
If states could remove illegal immigrants, it would be a huge step toward turning around the record-low number of deportations that happen each year under the Biden administration.
Only 16,351 illegal immigrants who were apprehended by local police departments were deported by ICE officials in the first nine-month period of the Biden administration, a 70 percent decrease from 2019.
Although the Biden administration lets tens of thousands of border crossers and illegal immigrants into the U.S. every single month, very few of them are being put through the deportation process.
Less than 20% of the group that the Biden administration discharged across the border into the United States were issued a Notice to Appear (NTA) before a federal immigration court.
