After what felt like forever, the longest and most detrimental government shutdown in United States history has come to an end.
On Friday, Jan. 25 The White House made a statement that President Trump signed the H.J. Res. 28, the “Further Additional Continuing Appropriations Act, 2019” on Friday, Jan. 25.
According to the statement made by The White House, President Trump’s act includes a short-term continuing resolution that provides fiscal year 2019 appropriations through Feb. 15, 2019 for continuing projects and activities of the federal government. Also included in the enrolled bill are provisions regarding retroactive pay and reimbursement, and extensions of certain authorities.
After this statement was made, instead of receiving praise from the Democrats who originally bashed him for keeping the government shut down for so long, he received a lot of backlash.
How surprising.
In an attempt to understand why President Trump opened the government we first have to understand why he closed it.
Illegal immigration is a huge problem in our nation, and it needs to be addressed immediately. As of 2016, there are 10.7 million illegal immigrants living in our country, according to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center.This number is expected to grow if we continue to do nothing to address our border crisis.
I personally feel that we need to have extreme reforms to our border security, whether it be a wall, better technology, more border patrol agents or all of the above. The issue of illegal immigration is the most serious issue our nation is facing currently. Not only is illegal immigration an awful thing for our country, but it is also awful for the women and children of other countries being abused and exploited in the hopes of getting into America illegally. President Trump revealed the demoralizing and criminal acts women and children must face in his immigration address to our nation.
The President said how Coyotes, which are men who smuggle Latin Americans across U.S. borders illegally for a high price, are one of the most dangerous threats to women and children. Both women and children unfortunately have to deal with multiple days of both physical abuse and rape during their journey to America.
Unfortunately, that is not even the end of the crimes we see due to our sub-par border security. The President also emphasized the high number of drugs pouring into this country, in his illegal immigration address. According to ScienceNews, the society for science and the public, the drug overdose rates in our country are rising exponentially. Another study done by National Institute on Drug Abuse, shows that more than 72,000 Americans died of an overdose in 2017. The number of deaths is continually on the rise which is why we need to better secure our borders to prevent more drugs from entering our country.
Nogales Border Security Patrol in Arizona arrested a man after finding 40 pounds of cocaine in his vehicle at an immigration checkpoint. Luckily this man was caught and stopped. If we continue to increase our border security, more drug mules will be captured, which means less drugs will enter our country.
Unfortunately, despite all the security risks us Americans face because of our border policies, politicians still cannot agree on what we need to do to take care of them. President Trump insists his border wall is going to solve our immigration problems while Democrats declare it “immoral.”
Because both parties are so set in their ways, the only way that we can do something to address this issue is compromise.
Fox News broadcasted President Trump’s address to our nation in which he proposed a new bill requiring technology to secure ports of entry, an additional 2,750 border agents and law enforcement professionals, 75 new immigration judge teams to speed up the court backlog of about 900,000 immigration cases, a new system to allow Central American minors to apply for asylum in their home countries, reforms for the unification of unaccompanied children and lastly $5.7 billion for a strategic border wall.
While this bill seemed to give Democrats many things they wanted, it still was considered a “non-starter” bill because it promotes things the Democratic Party does not stand for.
I find this both laughable and hypocritical.
The Secure Fence Act of 2006 authorized about 700 miles of fencing along certain stretches of land between the border of the United States and Mexico. This act also authorized the use of more vehicle barriers, checkpoints and lighting and the use of advanced technology, such as satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles.
When this act was being voted on, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer and 23 other Democrat senators voted in favor of the act, which allowed it to pass in the Senate by a vote of 80 to 19, according to GovTrack. After seeing how little opposition there was from the Democratic Party on border security enhancements in 2006, I find it hard to believe that there is any other reason they are against President Trump’s border security proposals other than the fact that they strongly oppose him as a person.
This was evident when the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi decided to reject President Trump’s new proposal that he was going to announce, before he even got a chance to announce it. This was a poor move for Pelosi because a lot of Republicans who already dislike her, and a lot of people within her own party, were angered that she was so unwilling to cooperate with the President while 800,000 people were out of work because of it. Lindsey Graham, Senator of South Carolina, said it best in an interview on Fox News, “Nancy Pelosi has become a nightmare for the Democratic Party, she seems unreasonable, she seems to have a dislike for the President that is hurting our country.”
Personally, I felt this government shutdown became more about partisan conflict than border security issues.
Continuing to move forward for the next two years is going to be difficult if Democrats can’t move past the idea of Trump being President, and actually try to get work done.
It is outrageous how long the government was shut down for, and both parties are to blame for it. However, it confuses me how people can only blame the president, meanwhile I believe he was the only person making negotiations and trying to cooperate. Hopefully this shutdown will teach the government that when they ignore the policies behind issues and only focus on their party, a lot of good American citizens get hurt because of it.
