Since last year, Voces Unidas has been hearing about a pending international aid package brokered between the Senate and the Biden administration that was rumored to include Trump-era immigration policies that have already been proven to be extremely harmful to our immigrant communities while not fixing any of the problems we face at the border.
On Sunday, Senate negotiators unveiled the Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2024 proposal. By Wednesday, the deal had failed to get enough support in the Senate.
The proposed $118 billion international aid package included many enforcement-only provisions, including the Border Act of 2024, which would have increased barriers for asylum-seekers coming to the U.S., expedited deportation of certain migrants awaiting processing, and increased border security while decreasing avenues for citizenship and parole.
Unfortunately, the Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2024 was brokered in bad faith and without genuine input from all policymakers and stakeholders. The proposed deal did nothing to address our broken immigration system or the root cause of migration.
For example, the proposal ignored the millions of long-term immigrants in mixed-status families in the U.S. and the half-million DACA recipients who still have no pathway to citizenship. Nor does it address those 2.2 million Dreamers who came to this country as children and were never eligible for DACA or any path forward. The deal also failed to create a legal system to meet our current and future labor demands in agriculture and in many other fields.
Our broken immigration system, and the failure to establish humane and comprehensive immigration reform, is nothing new. Historically, no administration in the past 30 years has committed to addressing meaningful immigration reform, and our communities have suffered as a result.
We welcome a genuine debate and bipartisan negotiations, with input from policymakers and stakeholders, to solve our flawed and broken immigration system and policies. We support orderly and humane immigration laws that create legal pathways to migrate to the U.S., address the needs of the 11 million people caught up in our current broken systems, and keep families together.
We are calling on our federal elected representatives to reject anti-immigrant legislation and proposals that will not fix and address our broken immigration systems but only serve to dehumanize immigrants. The time for games is over. Let's fix our broken immigration systems with comprehensive immigration reforms.