The Biden administration inherited a “terrible” situation at the border, but it is addressing the issues, and the problems will improve, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Wednesday.
“As far as the children are concerned, we can just imagine, me as a mother of five, grandmother of nine, every minute a child is separated from a parent to me is a crisis,” the Pelosi said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “We want this to move along expeditiously, but we have to have a real plan, and what they inherited was terrible.”
President Joe Biden, she added, has been in office for less than two months, she pointed out, but at the same time, Pelosi said she takes issue with Republicans who are saying “that they’re terrorists coming into the country.”
“What we want to do is honor our responsibilities as a nation in terms of the crown jewel of our humanitarianism, what we do in terms of asylum seekers, but also meet the needs of the children coming in,” Pelosi said.
Her comments came as the House was prepared to vote soon on two Democrat immigration bills, both of which are facing heavy opposition from Republicans, reports Politico. The first bill, The Dream and Promise Act, will provide a pathway to citizenship for “Dreamers.”
The other bill, the Farm Modernization Workforce Act, was supported by more than 30 Republicans in the last session of Congress, but also likely will be opposed.
Meanwhile, Biden has told migrants they should stay away from the U.S. border for now. Pelosi said many immigrants are taking the risk because they have a “well-founded fear” of danger in their own countries.
The border crowding is also being aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, she said.
“There are 13,000 beds that could receive many of these incoming immigrants,” Pelosi said. “However, because of COVID, you can’t use 13,000 because you have to space them.”
She also accused the Trump administration of having “no respect for the responsibility” the United States has as a country to give shelter to people who fear danger in their homelands.
“Many of these people are in grave, grave danger at home, and that’s why they risk coming here,” she said. “We have to make some distinctions about those who have a well-founded fear, and we have to have the capacity at the border to do that or to have that adjudicated in the country of origin, but recognize that we have that responsibility as we pass judgment on other countries for not receiving refugees into their country.”
Pelosi also discussed the disagreements going on concerning calls for a bipartisan commission to study the violent events of Jan. 6 at the Capitol.
“They want to treat something like the Black Lives Matter peaceful demonstrations in a similar manner as they would do Jan. 6,” Pelosi said. “The main problem is the scope of the investigation. We can pass a bill, but that’s not the point. You want it to be bipartisan. It cannot be bipartisan if the scope of it is to not draw any conclusions about what happened that day as the premise for how we would go forward and investigate it. We must investigate it and we must get the truth for the American people.”
She also denied that she was involved with the security plans at the House, or that she had been asked if the National Guard should be deployed before Jan. 6.
“We were assured by the security for the Capitol that they were prepared,” she said. “I was not asked anything about the National Guard until after 1 p.m. [that day] … there was a delay in terms of responding for that.”
She added that it has been proposed to have a permanent, designated National Guard unit that would always be ready in the event that they would be needed.
“When they were, it made a big difference,” Pelosi said.
Source: Newmax
