In the News

For U.S. Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, a nameless Honduran infant who showed up at a U.S. border crossing in McAllen, Texas this month without his parents epitomizes a national immigration crisis caused by well-intentioned policies that aren’t working out as planned.

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“If you think about that baby, there’s really only a handful of potential starting points,” says Gonzalez, who has an infant son of his own. “Either the baby was kidnapped, the parents were killed, or the parents willingly gave the baby up. That’s where you very clearly see this is a real crisis and we have to do something about this.”

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Gonzalez says his own father and grandparents legally immigrated to the United States from Cuba after spending months in their home country waiting for their paperwork to be approved. Fearing execution by Fidel Castro’s regime, the family hid in other people’s houses, traveling frequently to avoid capture, says Gonzalez.

“My perspective has always been that you want an immigration system that prioritizes and rewards legal immigration,” says Gonzalez. “That’s ultimately what my family chose to do.”

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[Reps. Gonzalez and Ben McAdams (D-UT)] hope that visiting the border as part of a bipartisan group will help them devise reforms that Republicans and Democrats can agree upon, ending the longtime stalemate that’s worsened the nation’s immigration problems. They suggest that adding more judges would help reduce legal bottlenecks at the border, and allowing immigrants to seek asylum at U.S. embassies in their home country might keep people from walking thousands of miles to the United States through dangerous conditions under the control of a drug cartel.

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