John Fetterman is bucking his own Democrat Party by calling for them to come back to the negotiating table in the Senate on fixing the border.
Fetterman says it’s not xenophobic to care about the border and that Democrat should understand that.
Here’s more from Politico:
As stalled immigration negotiations imperil U.S. aid to Ukraine and Israel, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) is blaming not only Republicans but also members of his own party for what he described as a reflexive political resistance to a border security deal.
“I hope Democrats can understand that it isn’t xenophobic to be concerned about the border,” Fetterman said in an interview. “It’s a reasonable conversation, and Democrats should engage.”
Fetterman, a progressive favorite, urged Democrats to acknowledge the large numbers of migrants streaming across the southern border. He cited the nearly 270,000 border encounters that U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported in September.
“Honestly, it’s astonishing. And this isn’t a Fox News kind of statistic. This is the government’s,” he said. “You essentially have Pittsburgh showing up there at the border.”
His remarks come as Democrats increasingly stiff-arm the border talks for skewing too far toward GOP demands — and they’re even more striking given his status as a longtime vocal advocate for immigrants. His wife, Gisele Fetterman, was a so-called “Dreamer” who came to the U.S. from Brazil when she was seven years old, a story he highlighted in a video during his 2022 Senate primary. (She became a citizen in 2009.)
I know that Fetterman isn’t going be where we’d want him to be on the border. But it’s starting to sound like he’s got more common sense than his colleagues and he’s willing to do something about Biden’s disaster of a border.