The passage of the immigration bill, hinged on border security. To ensure the passage of the bill the Republicans added the Corker-Hoeven Amendment, which took $38 Billion dollars, for border enforcement, from the announced $197 Billion in savings over a ten-year period with the passage of the bill. With the Corker-Hoeven Amendment it drew immediate criticism from the Hispanic community. Below are some of the responses to this amendment to the bill that passed out of the Senate today:

Christian Ramirez, with the Southern Border Communities Coalition on behalf of CAMBIO: The outcome of the Senate vote tonight is an extreme measure aimed at collectively punishing Southern Border communities by some in exchange for political expediency. The Corker-Hoeven Amendment represents injudicious policies that will have a detrimental and disproportionate impact on border communities by throwing money at impractical policies that have contributed to gross human and civil rights abuses. As the immigration reform debate continues into the next stages, we are committed to fending for the rights of border communities by advocating for appropriate checks and balances on Border Patrol agents, specifically lapel cameras as acknowledged by key leaders in the Senate as an important accountability measure.

Oscar Chacón, Executive Director, NALACC: Since late last year, immigrant communities in the US have watched carefully, as first the Senate and now the House of Representatives takes up the issue of immigration reform. As anyone familiar with the system can attest, the country is in urgent need of public policies that can start to repair the many years of neglect that have pushed our immigration laws far out of sync with the realities of modern global migration.
As immigrant communities from Mexico, Central America and the rest of Latin America, we have listened to elected officials tout the growing importance of Latino voters. In this context, we had high hopes that the US Congress would put an end once and for all to the toxic rhetoric about immigration, and recognize the multiple ways in which immigrant communities, particularly those who reside in the US without authorization, have generously contributed to economic growth and fiscal revenues at all levels of government.

Sadly, the nature of the national conversation about immigration policy reform and about immigrant communities has remained as poisonous as in years past. The most recent turn of events in the legislative process clearly demonstrates how twisted this process has become. In the service of achieving “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” at all costs, our policy makers continue to feed into the erroneous notion that building more walls and essentially turning the US southern border into a permanent war zone, is the “solution” to our broken immigration policy. This is both bad public policy and obscenely wasteful; estimates are in excess of $40 billion over the next 10 years for drones, walls, and other draconian measures.

Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO President: Republicans have extracted a high price for moving this necessary legislation forward. The latest price for Republican support is the establishment of triggers to citizenship that, as Senator Leahy noted, read “like a Christmas wish list for Halliburton” and are clearly designed for one reason, to keep people from becoming citizens. There is no logical connection between achieving maximum militarization of the border and letting people who have spent 10 years in temporary status move closer to citizenship. Indeed, future Republicans afraid of immigrant voters might forestall achievement of triggers in order to deny citizenship to people who have satisfied a variety of conditions, including staying employed, avoiding public benefits and possessing no criminal history.