Vitter: Senate should return to deal with border

August 15, 2014, 05:03 pm
The Hill

Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) demanded that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) call the Senate back into session “immediately” to vote on House-passed immigration bills.

“We have a true crisis at our southern border. Yet Harry Reid is blocking Senate votes on the two bills the House has passed and has put us in recess instead,” Vitter said on Thursday. “I call on him to have the Senate vote on those two common-sense, House-passed bills immediately.”

Congress has recess for its five-week August break and is scheduled to return on Sept. 8.

Before the House adjourned earlier this month, it passed two measures in an effort to address the thousands of undocumented children from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala that have been detained along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Vitter blamed the recent influx of migrant children on Obama’s immigration policies, including his decision to defer the deportation of children brought illegally to the United States by their parents before 2007, also known as “Dreamers.”

The House-passed legislation that would prohibit the administration from issuing additional executive orders on immigration and would deport the “Dreamers.” It would also amend a 2008 human trafficking law to expedite the deportation of the nearly 50,000 children, who tried to cross the border this year.

Reid said there aren’t the votes in the Senate to pass those measures, which is why he adjourned the Senate without voting on them.

http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-actio...al-with-border