PHOENIX – Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly said that if Democratic candidate Kamala Harris is elected president, she will address border security by passing the bipartisan bill that her opponent torpedoed earlier this year.
“Kamala Harris has said she would sign the bipartisan border security bill that Democrats and Republicans negotiated … with her, the White House and the president,” Kelly said. Arizona Morning News from KTAR News 92.3 FM from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Monday.
Kelly has not always agreed with the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the border so far, but stressed Monday that the issue is best addressed through congressional action.
Why hasn’t the Biden-Harris administration passed border security legislation?
And Kelly said Congress’s best hope is the bipartisan bill that Republicans in the Senate rejected after Republican candidate Donald Trump opposed it.
“He was very specific about why,” Kelly said of Trump. “He said he needed this as a campaign issue. I’ve never seen anything like it. … I can’t remember a politician ever saying not to solve the problem, which is clearly a problem … because there’s an election coming up.”
Kelly said Biden waited until June to issue an executive order to slow the asylum process because he hoped Congress would pass a more comprehensive solution.
“The only option for the administration – for the president and Vice President Harris – was to take some actions by executive order. Those actions helped. They brought the numbers down,” Kelly said.
However, the Arizona senator said the bipartisan bill Harris wants to pass would do even more to secure the border.
“The Border Patrol agents would have been paid more. We could have hired more Border Patrol agents or CBP (Customs and Border Protection) agents. There were so many positive things in this bill,” he said.
