VIDEO: Young Discusses Border Crisis, New Illegal Migration Report

**Click here or the image above to watch**

WASHINGTON – Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, today joined fellow committee members to discuss the ongoing crisis at the U.S. southern border and their recently released report entitled “Biden’s Border Crisis: Examining Policies that Encourage Illegal Migration.”

The report highlights how the Biden Administration is undermining U.S. efforts to reduce illegal migration and jeopardizing U.S. security.

Excerpts of Young’s remarks are below:

“It’s been well over a year since I summoned a member of the (Biden) administration into a classified setting. Operating in my capacity as the chief Republican on the Foreign Relations Subcommittee that oversees counterterrorism, I asked to be briefed on the number of suspected terrorists who had crossed our southern border.

“I have to say the briefing was absolutely sobering. We had individuals from Yemen. We had, of course, individuals from Central and South America, Africa, all over the world. Many of the hotspots of the world and the locus of terrorist activity were the source of so many individuals coming across our southern border…..I did all I could to try and fix the attention of the executive branch of our government on this national security issue. And nothing happened.

“Since then the situation has grown much graver. This is not only a national security disaster. This is also a humanitarian catastrophe. It’s a fifty state catastrophe as well. Every state is indeed a border state.”

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“We’re not here empty-handed. We’re not here devoid of answers on how we can improve this situation. No. We’ve come here armed with a study, a study which lays out certain recommendations about how to establish effective immigration controls in the United States, how we might strengthen our border security and migration management capacities in that southern border region. How we might target smuggling and trafficking operations by transnational criminal organizations.”

Key findings of the report include:

• President Biden has reversed important Trump-era reforms that effectively addressed illegal migration, and reinstated failed Obama-era policies. These policies are undermining U.S. efforts to build effective law enforcement and asylum processing mechanisms across Mexico and northern Central America, leading to the highest number of migrants attempting to illegally enter the United States in history.
• Transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) benefit from and prolong the illegal migration crisis by facilitating and profiting off the smuggling and trafficking of migrants, or by victimizing vulnerable people along the dangerous journey to the United States.
• The governments of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are falling short on their own domestic and international obligations to address transnational organized crime and illegal migration issues, putting U.S. security at risk. The Biden Administration should seek to enforce these obligations, including the agreements the Trump Administration made with these countries.

Key recommendations of the report include:

• Establish effective immigration controls in the United States:
  • Extend Title 42 until the end of the COVID-19 health emergency.
  • Reinstate the Migrant Protection Protocols and Asylum Cooperative Agreements.
• Strengthen border security and migration management capacities in the region:
  • Target U.S. assistance in Mexico and northern Central America towards strengthening the capacity, funding, and staffing of migration management and law enforcement agencies in those countries.
• Target TCO human smuggling and trafficking:
  • Leverage existing bilateral extradition treaties to prosecute transnational criminal actors facilitating illegal migration to the United States.  

A copy of the report can be found here.