Rep. Ruben Gallego and Attorney General Kris Mayes slam Congress for blocking border bill

State and federal officials visited a southern Arizona border community with the largest port of entry in the state to push Congress to pass border reform legislation that was blocked by the U.S. Senate.

U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes joined Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway in Nogales on Monday to emphasize the needs of border communities. The needs are dire as Southern Arizona towns and cities await potential chaos at the border with federal funding to help migrants expected to expire at the end of this month.

Gallego, who this year is running for the U.S. Senate, and Mayes called on Congress to pass the bipartisan border deal unveiled earlier this year and blocked in the Senate.

The bill would allocate $20 billion to overhaul access to asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border and would allow the federal government to shut down asylum processing during high levels of migration, limit the release of migrants, and reduce the length of time it takes to adjudicate asylum claims. The bill also allocated funding to counter the flow of fentanyl into the country.

“Extremists in Congress must put politics aside and pass the funding and border security reform bill that is right now sitting idly in Congress,” Gallego said. “Every minute we wait means more fentanyl deaths, more strain on first responders … and a looming possibility of street releases.”

Hathaway, the sheriff, said the county’s primary need in addressing the record border crossings is additional immigration judges to handle immigration claims, which he said the bill addressed.

“I'm sad to say that for political reasons, that bill never went forward. It had the solutions that all political groups have been asking for,” he said.

Republicans blocked the deal earlier this year after former President Donald Trump, again the GOP presidential front-runner, signaled his opposition to it because immigration is one of the key focus of his presidential campaign. Democrats accused Trump of playing politics to deny Biden an election-year victory by spiking the deal.

House Republicans are instead pushing for a House-passed proposal, the Secure the Border Act of 2023. It's a stricter bill that, among other things, would restart large-scale border wall construction and reimplement Trump-era immigration programs such as "Remain in Mexico," or Asylum Cooperative Agreements with Central American countries. Those programs ended by the Biden administration are deeply unpopular with Democrats.

Congress also blocked funding that included funds to install vehicle scanners at the border to more efficiently spot fentanyl being brought into the country.

In recent years fentanyl overdoses have increased, more than tripling from 2016 to 2021, according to the CDC, as fentanyl becomes more potent. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration laboratory testing in 2023 showed that 7 out of 10 pills tested contain a potentially deadly dose of fentanyl. 

However, scanners used to address this issue sit unused in warehouses, after Republicans blocked a supplemental funding request to install the equipment, Gallego said.  

Mayes said because fentanyl is easy to hide, and often packaged in nondescript items, the scanners are essential for curbing the flow of the deadly drug into the U.S., more than half of which seized in 2022 and 2023 was seized in Arizona.

“We have Arizonans dying every day for no reason at all when we have scanners that can prevent this fentanyl from entering the country sitting right here in warehouses,” she said.

Reach the reporter at sarah.lapidus@gannett.com. The Republic’s coverage of southern Arizona is funded, in part, with a grant from Report for America. Support Arizona news coverage with a tax-deductible donation at supportjournalism.azcentral.com.