U.S. Rep. Kay Granger is going to the border this week. Here’s why
U.S. Rep. Kay Granger is heading to the Texas-Mexico border this week to check on work being done there.
What the Fort Worth Republican sees will help her “better advocate for the funding needed to secure our border,” she said in a statement released by House Appropriations Committee Republicans.
Granger — who serves as the top Republican on the House spending committee and is up for re-election next year — plans to be in El Paso Friday and Saturday.
Earlier this week, news came out that a group building a border wall with private dollars at the border in Texas has to stop construction.
We Build the Wall is working to build a border to support President Donald Trump’s effort to create the barrier. The group has already built about one mile of fencing near El Paso and wanted to repeat that near McAllen, The New York Times reported. But the International Boundary and Water Commission needs more information first.
As Granger heads to the border this week, protesters are expected to continue showing up on a sidewalk along University Drive, not far from her Fort Worth office, as they have for more than a year.
They’ve been there every Friday, waving a variety of signs such as one that states “Keep Families Together,” since learning about Trump’s policy of separating children from their parents at the border.
Granger, who has served in Congress since 1997, talked about her work in 2014 regarding the border crisis during an August Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce Leaders in Government luncheon.
She said that was when she pushed then-House Speaker John Boehner to create a congressional task force to study the problem.
That’s when she first learned children were being sent without other family members, traveling with so-called coyotes — people paid thousands of dollars to bring children or adults into the United States — from countries as far away as Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
Granger said the solution was to reunite children with family in the country they came from or, if that wasn’t possible, to reunite them with family in the United States.
