FAIR Lays Out Legislative Agenda for the New Congress

Focus Must Be on Permanently Ending Failed Open-Borders Policies

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- With a new presidential administration and a new Congress set to assume power in 2025, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) has issued a detailed agenda for securing our borders, ensuring our immigration laws are enforced, establishing legal immigration policies that serve the national interest and defending voting integrity after four years of mass illegal immigration.

"Immigration was a key issue in an election that returned Donald Trump to the White House and put Republicans in control of both houses of Congress. FAIR's legislative agenda for the 119^th Congress provides legislators with a blueprint for what needs to be done to clean up the disastrous immigration policies of the past four years. We must ensure that no future administration can abuse its power to undermine the integrity of our immigration laws and the interests of the American people the way the Biden-Harris administration did," said Dan Stein, president of FAIR.

The security of our borders remains of paramount concern to the American people after four chaotic years in which some 11 million people entered our country illegally, along with roughly two million gotaways who evaded border agents entirely. These illegal border-crossers included violent criminals and people on the terror watch list who flagrantly abused our humanitarian programs. FAIR's legislative agenda lays out urgent steps that Congress must take to end these abuses. Among these steps:

• Requiring DHS to complete construction of the border wall.
• Ending catch-and-release policies.
• Curbing abuse of our asylum and parole laws.
• Amending laws and legal settlements that have encouraged a surge of unaccompanied minors and human trafficking.

These and other much-needed reforms were part of H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act, which was passed by the House of Representatives in 2023, but quashed by Senate leaders who refused to bring it to the floor. "With control of the Senate transferring to Republicans and a president who is prepared to sign these commonsense reforms into law, FAIR is urging swift action on this legislation in 2025," Stein said.

The actions of the Biden-Harris administration also demand that Congress act to ensure that no administration can arbitrarily refuse to enforce immigration laws or substitute its own policies in place of established statutes. "For the past four years, the Biden-Harris administration has simply ignored most immigration laws. Early in the administration, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas narrowly defined which illegal border-crossers would be subject to enforcement and declared, falsely, that merely being in the country illegally was not grounds for removal. Congress must act decisively to rein in such sweeping claims of prosecutorial discretion," stated Stein.

"In addition to refusing to enforce the law, the outgoing administration claimed unlimited authority to parole anyone they wanted into the country and to grant them authorization to work in the United States. This, too, must stop," Stein continued. "Our laws were crafted under the assumption that the Executive Branch would faithfully carry them out. Unfortunately, the past four years have demonstrated that faith alone is not enough."

FAIR's legislative agenda also calls for an overhaul of our legal immigration system, which is bloated and outdated. "It is clear that our legal immigration process, which promotes family-based chain migration, is not serving the interests of the nation. It needs to be replaced with a merit-based immigration policy that evaluates people based on what they can contribute to the common good of the country, not on who they are related to," Stein said.

"There is a lot to be done to end mass illegal immigration.  We must remove people who shouldn't be here and implement a fairer legal immigration system that better serves the interests of the nation. And we must act swiftly. FAIR's legislative agenda provides lawmakers a road map for addressing the priorities of the American people and ensuring that their interests cannot be subverted again by a lawless administration bent on using immigration policy to advance its own ideological interests," Stein concluded.

FAIR's full Legislative Agenda for the 119^th Congress can be found here.

Contact: Joey Chester, [email protected] or 202-740-7355

SOURCE Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)