To watch Senator Capito’s remarks, click here or the image above.
 

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Ranking Member of the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, today joined a group of her colleagues to urge President Biden not to rescind Title 42 authority, which would greatly exacerbate the ongoing crisis at the southern border.

In July 2021, Senator Capito sent a letter to President Biden urging him not to lift Title 42, and has continued to do so over the past year, including when the Biden administration announced in April it would terminate Title 42 authority, effective May 23, 2022.

HIGHLIGHTS:

SOUNDING THE ALARM ONCE AGAIN: “We've been here before. We've been talking about this…it’s at least the second or third press conference that I've been a party of to talk in a cautionary tale as to what we see over the horizon and the administration, by their own admission, by numbers…they are acknowledging that it will occur. So here we go again.”

ON THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S LACK OF A PLAN: “We were on this call yesterday with Secretary Mayorkas and when we talked afterwards…a six-point plan…it's only a way to manage more and more numbers that are coming. It isn't really managing. It’s transportation. It’s health care. It’s moving people from actually the border into more central parts and then processing them there.”

RESOURCES STRETCHED THIN DUE TO BIDEN’S BORDER CRISIS: “I'm the ranking member on the Appropriations Committee for Homeland Security. We've been very generous with Homeland Security. We've provided them already with the supplemental to help them deal with the surge. When we see what's going to be the influx, or catastrophe as I would categorize it, that is another press on the appropriations and on the resources that we're going to be willing to look at and give to the Department of Homeland Security.”

IMPACT OF BORDER CRISIS ON WEST VIRGINIA, LAW ENFORCEMENT MORALE: “I join with my colleagues, with my Democrat colleagues, with those in the media, with my folks at home that are very concerned about this. Why would somebody in West Virginia be worried about this? Because we have the highest percentage of deaths from overdose per capita than any other state in the union. Fentanyl is killing our friends and neighbors and it's all coming through the southern border. So the diversion of agents…and they're losing agents because the morale is terrible. Why would you want to be protecting our southern borders and be prideful of what you're doing in law enforcement every day when your president is just letting you get overrun? You can't divert. You can't disrupt the drug trade because you're so busy processing and doing all the things that happens when 18,000 people come across the border every single day.”

URGING PRESIDENT BIDEN TO RECONSIDER DECISION TO END TITLE 42: “So, there's time Mr. President to rethink this. There's time for us to find a better way. The plan needs to be deterrence. Whether it's expedited removals, quick asylum adjudication to get that, the Remain in Mexico policy. We have some solutions here that worked under the Trump administration to keep these numbers down. It’s time now to look seriously at these before this catastrophe descends upon us.”

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