A group of House Democrats facing a tough campaign cycle has called on President Joe Biden to take executive action at the US border with Mexico.
Lawmakers from Minnesota, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Michigan, among other states, urged Biden in a letter first obtained by CBS News to “immediately take further action to restore order to the southern border and fix our system broken immigration.”
Mr. Biden has faced harsh criticism from Republicans and some within his own party for his approach to immigration and the border ahead of November's general election. That dynamic is playing out as Mr. Biden runs against former President Donald Trump, his presumptive Republican rival, for another term.
In April, CBS News polls of three presidential battleground states (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) showed that most likely voters see the US-Mexico border as an important factor in their vote for president
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday about the letter.
However, the collapse of a bipartisan border agreement in the Senate earlier this year offered Democrats a chance to counter longstanding GOP attacks on the issue.
The new letter, headed by Minnesota Democrat Angie Craig, points to Republicans' torpedoing of that deal as a sign that Mr. Biden should act on his own.
“It has become clear that the current situation remains unsustainable, but with Republicans making policy on border security, it is time for your administration to act,” the letter said. “We urge you to use every tool at your disposal, including executive action, to better address security at the southern border, ban illicit fentanyl, and allow orderly legal immigration.”
Among the 15 Democratic House members who signed Tuesday's letter are Rep. Elissa Slotkin, who is running for an open Senate seat in Michigan, as well as Reps. Susan Wild and Matt Cartwright, two Democratic incumbents in the state of pennsylvania, presidential battleground. Fellow representatives Susie Lee and Steven Horsford of the politically crucial state of Nevada also signed the letter.
The lawmakers note in their letter that “all of our constituents, regardless of our congressional district, have felt the impacts of the current border situation.”
Last week, the House approved a Republican-led measure that in part denounced “the open border policies of the Biden administration,” in a bipartisan vote of 223 to 191. Thirteen Democrats joined 210 Republicans in giving support for the effort, including Craig and three members who also signed Tuesday's letter to Mr. Biden.
Similar criticism from the GOP also passed the House earlier this year with a small level of Democratic support. Most Democrats, however, have voted against these messaging efforts.
Democrats narrowly lost control of the House in the 2022 midterms, returning the chamber to Republican leaders for the first time since early 2019. However, the narrow GOP majority has frequently struggled since taking over . Democrats would only need to win a small number of seats to regain control in this fall's general election.
Tuesday's letter is the latest demonstration of how the border and immigration in general can be a contentious issue, as Mr. Biden seeks to maintain the enthusiasm of both centrist-minded Democrats and more progressive voters.
In recent months, Mr. Biden has been considering executive action to reduce illegal border crossings, which soared to record levels last year. one of the it moves The probe would involve the president restricting asylum by invoking an authority known as 212(f) that allows presidents to suspend the entry of aliens when their arrival is deemed “detrimental” to US interests. The administration, however, has not yet announced any new border measures.
The Biden administration recently announced a new regulation that allows a large number of undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children to enroll in Affordable Care Act health insurance.
During a fundraiser in Texas in late March, Mr. Biden repeatedly accused Mr. Trump of bringing “chaos” to the border by leading a GOP effort in Congress to shut down the Senate's bipartisan border deal. Mr. Biden has also criticized Mr. Trump's inflammatory rhetoric about immigrationafter the former president said undocumented migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
CBS News reporters Aaron Navarro and Kristin Brown contributed to this report.
