Sen. Graham Plans to Introduce Bill That Will Stop the Immigration 'Madness'....." I will be introducing a package, and, hopefully, with Democratic support, that will change our asylum laws. Ninety percent of the people who apply for asylum never make it, so the standard needs to change. We have a court decision called the Flores decision that says you can only hold a minor child 20 days.
If a family comes here with a minor child, we release the entire family after 20 days, because we don't have bed space. So we need to change that decision. And also we have a quirk in our law that if you're from Central America, you cannot be sent back home as a minor child because of a law on the books that prohibits sending children back from noncontiguous countries.
So the only place we can send a child back to is Mexico and Canada. We need to be sending these kids back to Central America, where they come from. So I'm going to put a legislative package together right after the break. We're going to mark it up in the Judiciary Committee and we're going to get on with solving this problem.
Voting on a bill with put everyone on record, Graham said, but he added, "I hope we do more than just vote. I hope we solve the problem."
He has three goals in mind:...........
The first part of Graham's plan deals with asylum.
He noted that the United States is part of an international treaty that offers asylum to people "when they're under threat of life and limb." But under that treaty, migrants are supposed to apply for asylum in the first safe country they reach, which would be Mexico, in the case of Central American migrants...........
.............Number two, Graham said the Flores legal decision needs to change:
"It's impossible to do a hearing in 20 days. So, we're going to try to change the time you can hold an unaccompanied minor or a minor child beyond 20 days, because if you come up with a family, and you have got minor kids in the family, we release the whole family in 20 days, because you don't want to separate families. So we need to fix the Flores decision.
"And, finally, there's a quirk in the law that if you're from Central America as a minor child, we can't send you back. We need to change that law, so we can send them back to Central America, where they came from."..............
.............."We need troops at the border. We need a wall. But there's no way you're going to stop the flow from Central America until you change our laws. And these laws are insane. We need to change them."........
https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/sen-graham-plans-introduce-bill-will-stop-immigration-madness