President Biden will ask Congress for $14 billion for border security, as part of his “urgent budget request” to fund US “national security needs.”
While Biden, 80, didn’t mention the porous southern border once during Thursday’s roughly 15-minute address from the Oval Office, the second of his presidency, several media outlets have reported that funding for border protection is indeed a part of his $105 billion ask to Congress.
One lawmaker, however, expressed concern that the money wouldn’t actually be used to tighten up the border.
“It’s got to be designed to secure the border, not to facilitate travel through the border,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) told the Associated Press.
Validating his colleague’s fears, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) argued Thursday that additional congressional appropriations for the southern border should go to soft costs that come with overseeing the US-Mexico boundary line.
“There’s a huge need to reimburse for the costs of processing,” Murphy told the AP.
“So it’s personnel costs, it’s soft-sided facilities, it’s transportation costs.”
“This is a supplemental funding bill. The minute you start loading it up with policies, that sounds like a plan to fail,” he said, expressing doubt that lawmakers would be able to “settle our differences over immigration in the next two weeks.”
Roughly 3.8 million people have entered the US through its borders since Biden took office in 2021 — nearly half of whom slipped into the country illegally and were never caught.
So-called “gotaways” have been steadily increasing since the president’s inauguration.
US Border Patrol reported at least 530,000 gotaways – migrants believed to have made it across the border without being detected or caught – this year, as of May 2023, the last month for which data has been released.
That figure is just shy of the record-breaking 600,000 reported by the Department of Homeland Security in all of 2022, and far more than the 389,000 reported in 2021.
