With Arizona at the front lines of the raging border crisis, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly has been working with Republicans to find measures that can garner majority support in a split Senate that has struggled to pass legislation on the border crisis -- while also pushing the Biden administration to take further action.
Kelly, who was elected in the traditionally red state in 2020 and is running for re-election this year, has been willing to buck his own party and the Biden administration on border security issues. After President Biden’s first address to a joint session of Congress in April, Kelly was the only Democratic senator to fault Biden for not mentioning the border crisis.
Earlier this year, he was critical of the Biden administration’s plan to end the Title 42 public health order -- which was being used to expel a majority of migrants at the border -- and signed onto bipartisan legislation to delay the move until a plan was in place.
His pressure has produced results. After he called for additional resources at the border earlier this year, a spending bill included $100 million for extra Border Patrol hiring and $1.2 billion for border processing and management. Border Patrol has since been offering hiring bonuses to try and bring in new agents.
Then this month, the Biden administration announced that it would fill four gaps in the border wall near Yuma, Arizona, something for which Kelly had lobbied. The announcement was notable given the Biden administration’s intense opposition to border wall construction beyond limited repair and environmental operations.
Kelly acknowledged it had been difficult to secure that commitment, but cited his own background working for NASA -- where he served as a Space Shuttle pilot -- and in the Navy as experience tackling difficult operational problems.
"I get the politics out of this," Kelly told Fox News Digital in an interview this week. "I've spent a lot of time on our southern border. And it didn't take me long to realize that different parts of our border need a different approach. In some places we need physical barriers, especially near population centers like Yuma, Nogales, Douglas, El Paso…San Diego. In other places technology is more important, it's more cost-effective."
"There are areas of the Arizona-Mexico border where to put the physical barriers that we see down there, it's just really destructive to the environment in areas where there's not a lot of traffic. So that doesn't make a lot of sense," he said. "But where it does make sense, south of the Morelos Dam, yeah I'm going to work to get that done."
Beyond pushing the Biden administration for action, Kelly has also been working with Republican lawmakers, something that has been relatively rare when it comes to immigration -- where Democratic lawmakers unsuccessfully sought to go it alone on immigration reform measures last year.
Earlier this month, Kelly introduced a bill alongside fellow Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and Republican Sens. James Lankford, R-Okla., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio, to ramp up the number of Border Patrol agents with a new reserve force and hike pay by 14%. That bill, the Border Patrol Enhancement Act, also gained the support of the National Border Patrol Council, an organization that has typically been critical of the Biden administration's handling of the border.
"It's a challenging job. So they need the resources," Kelly said.
That bill comes after legislation in May introduced by Kelly and Portman that would require DHS to produce a strategic plan to deal with a migrant surge and includes a $1 billion contingency fund to carry it out that would carry on from one administration to the next.
"That's often where in so many areas of federal government that we often struggle is the transition. I've seen that as NASA for 15 years, one administration comes in, and they want to do stuff differently and there's a lot of change," he said. Sometimes if you just give these agencies, whether it's CBP or Border Patrol or our space program, the resources they need and a good plan, and you then allow them to execute the plan – you get good results."
With a slim Democratic majority in the House and a 50-50 split in the Senate, a bill with no bipartisan support stands little chance of making it into law. But legislation with both Republicans and Democrats signed on could make it through both chambers and realistically be signed by President Biden.
Kelly said the task was about finding where there could be common ground, and helping an overwhelmed Border Patrol was one of those areas.
"It's easy to agree on things like Border Patrol pay and a reserve force," he said. "It's obvious that Border Patrol doesn't have enough agents. They can't even hire the minimum right now, and we're trying to find ways for them to better recruit Border Patrol agents."
"I think a lot of members of the United States Senate realize that we have this crisis, and unfortunately some folks on both sides of the aisle politicize it. But then there's the rest of us that just want to find workable solutions that address what the American people need," he said.
Kelly also warned that this is an issue that concerns lawmakers and Americans from non-border states as well. He noted the rise in fentanyl coming to the border, which can spread to communities across the country -- just this week official numbers showed a 202% rise in fentanyl seizures in July from June.
"This affects all of us, not just Arizona, not just Texas. This affects folks in Nebraska and Wyoming. When you think about the amount of illegal drugs that come across the border like fentanyl -- 100,000 of Americans have died from that. So I hate it when I see that it becomes politicized. It shouldn't, we're all in this together, and we should work together to come up with solutions that work," he said.
