The news from El Paso

On Saturday, a Congressional delegation was in town, touring the border and posturing about border security.  Missing from the delegation was Sylvestre Reyes, who is currently El Paso’s Representative in Congress.  Some may remember Reyes as the architect of the now-famous “Operation Hold the Line,” initiated by Reyes in the early 1990s when he was the head of the El Paso area Border Patrol.  This somewhat renegade local operation — which entailed a massive increase in the use of the Border Patrol in the El Paso area — gave rise to national efforts to beef up border enforcement.  The INS acted under national pressures stirred up by the apparent success of the initiative.  (We’ve posted at other times about the fact that such measures are actually more “successful” at displacing migration than preventing it, but that’s another story).

At any rate, even Reyes — whom one would be hard-pressed to define as soft on immigration enfrocement —  has been highly critical of the current House proposals to deal with immigration issues through an enforcement-only approach.  Darren Maritz of the El Paso Times writes:

Absent from the [Congressional] delegation was Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, who during his own news conference Saturday described Hastert’s tour of the border as a political strategy aimed at preventing House and Senate leadership from conferencing to arrive at a compromise bill for President Bush to sign.

Republican leadership has taken a “mean-spirited” position in the House version of the bill by excluding any guest-worker program initiatives, by upgrading to a felony illegal immigration and by making it a crime for ministers or family members to assist undocumented immigrants, Reyes said.

“It doesn’t take too long to see that this law, this proposal, is more about sending an intolerant message to people than it is about security,” Reyes said. “We don’t want to be a country that’s anti-immigrant. That’s not our legacy. That’s not our tradition. That’s not what we’re about, but it’s what they’re about.”

The full El Paso Times story is here.

jmc