Democrat Mazie Hirono Blocks Bernie Moreno Common Sense Border Security Bill

Democrat Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) this week blocked a border reform bill introduced by freshman Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH), despite his plea to Democrats to unite on something so common sense.

“I know that my Democrat colleagues are in a mode where they want to fight everything that we’re doing, Mr. President, but we should at least come together on this,” Moreno said on the floor.

“As I look over at my democratic colleague, there’s only two of us — two of us as entire chamber — that are naturalized U.S. citizens,” he said of himself and Hirono. “We know first and what it means to be able to be accepted by this country. Ninety-eight were born here. Two of us were not. We became citizens of this country, and we got the ultimate opportunity to represent this country in the United States Senate.”

“Let’s come together one time and show the American people we don’t have to fight about everything. We can actually accomplish common sense legislation. Let’s put in code, let’s put in legislation, those executive orders that not once, not twice, but three times, has been proven to reduce border encounters,” Moreno continued, speaking of the Refugees Using Legal Entry Safely (RULES) Act.

According to a breakdown of the bill from Moreno’s office, the bill would:

(1) Require asylum applicants to file their request for asylum at legal ports of entry only.
(2) Prohibit the parole or release of asylum applicants into the United States.
(3) Prohibit applicants from claiming asylum again in the future after a previous application has been rejected.
(4) Prohibit any migrant caught in the United States illegally from ever claiming asylum in the future.

Moreno explained how these simple changes have dramatically helped in the past:

“I can’t imagine that my Democrat colleagues will fight this, and I hope that somebody who’s been here for ten weeks, as opposed to my colleagues, some of them have been here for two or three decades, fail to understand that the American people are watching,” he said, explaining that the American people are waiting for the House and Senate to work together and get stuff done.

“So I will yield to my Democrat colleague from Hawaii, and I implore you, let’s show leadership together, you and I, let’s show this leadership and get a very, very simple bill accomplished,” Moreno implored, but Hirono immediately shut it down.

“My colleague claims that this bill will reform our broken asylum system. As the other naturalized citizen in this body, I object, and we actually passed comprehensive immigration reform out of the Senate in 2013, and I was one of the senators who worked on that bipartisan bill, but when the bill, got to the House, it didn’t pass. So we are here,” she said.

“We know what happened [Mr. President] over the last four years at our southern border,” Moreno said in a statement. “It was a total and complete disgrace. It’s a disgrace not only because of the unlimited amount of people who came into this country – almost ten million encounters over a four year period – but it’s a disgrace because that’s not how we should be welcoming people to this country.”