Utah Sen. Mitt Romney is joining fellow Republicans in criticizing President Joe Biden’s border policies.
Romney, the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Spending Oversight, signed two letters to the president and another to the committee’s Democratic chairman “pushing back on the Biden administrations’s disastrous border policies,” according to a news release.
The president is urged to rescind a recent executive order creating a “parole in place” policy that allows people without legal status who are married to U.S. citizens to apply for citizenship without first leaving the country in a letter led by Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., and signed by Romney and 14 other GOP senators.
“Parole was never intended as a mass amnesty. Your actions fly in the face of the clear reading of the law. Due to reckless policies, your administration has encountered more illegal aliens at the southern border than the Obama administration and Trump administration combined,” the letter states, adding “the border data since implementation show what all Americans know – the border remains wide open.”
Another letter to Biden from Romney and other Republicans on the committee, led by Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., cites what is described as “an allegedly leaked memo instructing U.S. Border Patrol agents to release migrants into the U.S.” despite a Biden executive order barring migrants crossing the southern border illegally from receiving asylum once a threshold is reached.
The senators said in the letter the intent of the executive order was “designed to change the narrative around the border crisis you created, while this new U.S. Border Patrol memo maintains your status quo of purposeful action to create a wide-open border and encourage historic illegal immigration.”
The committee’s chairman, Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., also heard from Romney and other Republican members. That letter, led by the committee’s ranking member, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., seeks a “hearing on the danger of terrorism facilitated by easy access across the border.”
The Biden administration’s policies, they wrote, ”have directly contributed to unprecedented levels of illegal immigration, exposing a vulnerability that bad actors can exploit to enter the country,” so a hearing with top federal officials should be held “to discuss the Biden administration’s strategy for handling the significant increase in terrorists entering the country due to their policies.”