MISSION, Texas (KVEO) — On Monday, Representative Vicente Gonzalez led nine congressmen from different states on the first bipartisan delegation on the U.S.-Mexico border to come up with solutions for current border policies.
Gonzalez, who represents District 15, called the delegation “the problem-solver caucus,” which is made of 29 Republicans and Democrats. Their focus is to keep immigration policies as apolitical as possible.
U.S. Representative, Ed Case, of Hawaii’s First Congressional District said that immigration reforms should not be about political interests.
“This immigration system is broken, [its] in crisis, and needs to be fixed,” said Case. “What we cannot afford when we are dealing with a big, huge, multi-faceted crisis is to make it purely partisan baseball.”
Gonzalez said that being a bipartisan group gives them more influence and power in the White House.
“We are a bipartisan group. We are in committees across the congress, we have relationships with the speaker and leadership on both sides and relationships on both sides,” said Gonzalez. “We think in order to have a real solution it’s something that has to be done in a bipartisan way.”
One idea presented by Gonzalez was to open “first-class” processing facilities in Mexico and Central America to alleviate our southern borders.
“People can show up in a very humane first-class facility like what we have here or even better and be processed there and if they qualify for asylum they can come to the country,” said Gonzalez.
Although this delegation is from different parties, they all believe that the federal government is not present where it needs to be.
“The federal government the—what we all work for—has failed to address this problem for 30 years!” said Tom Suozzi, U.S. representative for New York’s Third District. “What we’ve said is that we can’t rely on our parties to do this, we have to get together as elected officials from across party lines to find common grounds to the problems that happen here.”
