Rep. Gonzales: Border Worse as Title 42 End Nears

The surge in the numbers of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border is getting worse as the expiration for the health emergency restriction known as Title 42 nears, Rep. Tony Gonzales told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

The Texas Republican said, “This is honestly the fourth time that we’ve seen that Title 42 is going to end. And every time we come to this situation, before the crisis is this uptick in illegal immigration. And we’re seeing that now.”

Gonzales said “the numbers are getting worse” as the May 11 expiration for Title 42 gets closer. “The agents are beyond an exhausting point. And it’s not just at the border. Now what you’re seeing is places 100, 150 miles from the border are just as overwhelmed as if they were on the Rio Grande themselves.”

Gonzales, who is co-chair of the Congressional Hispanic Conference, said that as part of the solution to the problem, he has requested that “we hold cartels accountable.”

“You want to get to the root of the cause. They’re the issue, so we go down this path of labeling cartels as terrorists. Another is giving resources to the people that are doing the work,” he said. “We got to give a pay raise to the border patrol agents.”

Gonzales emphasized, however, that “just throwing money at a problem doesn’t solve the issue.”

“How do we give them money to the things that are going to help secure the border, like repatriation flights? These are flights where people that do not qualify for asylum, they don’t get flown to New York or D.C. or Chicago; they get flown back to their country of origin,” he said. “That is how you solve the border crisis.”

Gonzales added that there are other actions that can help, such as “hiring Border Patrol agents, but you can’t just give DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] a blank check and have them go spend it on all these things. That … only encourages illegal immigration.”