By JONATHAN ZWEYGARDT
Hays Post
Kansas Congressman Roger Marshall, M.D., was among a group of lawmakers who toured the border with the United States and Mexico over the weekend and says the trip strengthened his belief in building a wall on the border.
Marshall, R-Great Bend, and other members of the congressional “Doc Caucus” toured the border and migrant processing centers near McAllen, Texas, on June 29. He told Hays Post in an interview this week the conditions continue to worsen at the border.
“The circumstances there today are five times worse than they were a year ago,” Marshall said. “It was a crisis, than (and) it’s almost exponentially worse today.”
Marshall toured the same area a year ago and said that while they have add more space at the detention centers they continue to deal with overcrowding.
“There just is not enough room for everybody, but the doctors, the nurses, the border patrol officers are all doing the very best they can,” he said. “They are all getting good health care screenings.
“Most the immigrants are coming in dehydrated, overheated, malnourished and stressed,” Marshall added. “They just went through 30 days of hell in the hands of the cartels.”
While the detention centers are crowded, Marshall said the immigrants at the facilities are being treated humanely and the Custom and Border Protection agents are doing the best they can with the resources they have.
“The officers are doing everything they can to enforce the law, but unfortunately our border patrol officers are spending 60 percent of their time being humanitarian workers,” Marshall said.
“Could we do better? Of course we could but until we shut the funnel off, until we slow down these refugees from coming across the border it’s just going to get worse,” he said.
Marshall added that normally immigrants only spend a few hours in the processing centers before they are transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities, but ICE is also dealing with overcrowding and is refusing to take people. As a result, CBP is forced to house immigrants in the processing centers for extended periods of time.
For Marshall, the return trip to the border reinforced his belief that a wall needs to be built and Congress must do more.
“The president was right. The president is right. We have to build the wall,” he said.
Last week, Congress approved a $4.6 billion aid package to care for immigrants flowing over the southern border, but Marshall said that money is going to run out soon.
Currently, Marshall said there are about 60,000 people being held in the facilities at a cost of a $1,000 per day. That is a cost of $60 million per day, and he estimated it would last about 80 days.
“I want to do everything we can do help people, we need to be humanitarian,” Marshall said. “But even the United States has a finite amount of resources, and until we build the wall, until Congress does its job and closes the loopholes on the asylum, it’s only going to get worse.”
So is there a compromise? Can lawmakers find some common ground? Marshall isn’t optimistic.
“We had legislation on the House floor last summer that would have cured 95 percent of this problem,” Marshall said. “It had $25 billion of funding for the wall, it had significant agriculture guest worker visas, a DACA fix and it closed the asylum loophole, but Democrats would not support the bill. I couldn’t get all the Republicans to support it, so it died.”
He added he believes the judiciary committee in the House should be leading the effort to help solve the issue, but they are investigating President Trump instead.
“It’s got to be one of the biggest frustrations of my life is the solution is right there in front of us, but Nancy Pelosi is going to put politics ahead of the American people,” Marshall said.