Democrat Mark Kelly Wants Border Security Ramped Up After Texas Shooting

Arizona Democratic Senator Mark Kelly is calling for increased security measures enforced by both the United States and Mexico after the revelation that the Mexican national suspected of killing five people in Texas last week had been deported four times.

The suspect, Francisco Oropeza, remains on the run after the 38-year-old allegedly opened fire last Friday on residents of a neighboring home who asked him to stop shooting his rifle in his yard. Five people were killed, including a mother and her 9-year-old son.

As the search for Oropeza entered its fourth day Monday, CNN quoted an unnamed source with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who said he had been deported at least four times before the shootings—twice in 2009 and on separate occasions in 2012 and 2016. The incident has prompted calls for heightened scrutiny in vetting undocumented migrants before they enter this country.

While it is unclear why Oropeza, who entered the country illegally, was deported, his story is one that is "repeated over and over," Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma told Newsweek on Tuesday.

"It's not just the shooter that's there in Texas," said Lankford, a ranking member of the Senate homeland security committee's Subcommittee on Government Operations and Border Management. "There are multiple examples of individuals that come in, have a criminal record or have multiple deportations, and it's a felony obviously at that point. So this is just another lesson."

Others in the Senate agree. "The border is too porous," said Republican Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, another member of the government operations and border management panel.

"It makes no sense at all for us to have fencing with gaps in it and not to have completed the border fence," he told Newsweek. But technology is also going to come to our aid, and it's frankly outrageous that somebody's been deported multiple times and keeps coming back."

Newsweek has contacted Immigrations and Customs Enforcement for comment, including on what incidents initially led to each of Oropeza's deportations.

The concerns over the accused gunman's entry into the U.S. appear to be bipartisan. Kelly, a moderate Democrat, told Newsweek he believes there needs to be more scrutiny of those seeking to enter the country. He called on Congress to come together to increase the number of Border Patrol agents, improve technology at the border and, in some cases, install additional barriers in places "where they make sense" in an effort to reduce the number of migrants who enter the country undocumented.

But Kelly stopped short of saying a deal could be accomplished in this congressional session, as Republicans and Democrats continue to spar over the nation's immigration policies.

Republicans in the House have proposed continued construction of an end-to-end border wall and reinstatement of former President Donald Trump's "remain in Mexico" policies keeping asylum seekers in the country. But most GOP-led plans stand no chance in the Democratic-controlled Senate, which has maintained the need for some type of pipeline to ease legal immigration into the country.

"I would like to believe, and I do believe, that we come together to do things that are important for our country," Kelly said. "Border security is important. Immigration reform is incredibly important. If you speak to any CEO—I mean, of the CEOs I've spoken to in the last two and a half years, I can't think of one that does not have an issue in finding the workforce that they need.

He continued: "In Arizona specifically, we have this growing semiconductor industry. We've got agriculture and ranching, and ranchers and farmers need a reliable workforce, and they really struggle. At the same time, we need to come together to provide a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers. It's the right thing to do." (Recipients in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program are often called Dreamers, after the DREAM Act that never passed Congress.)

Others in Congress, however, point to a different issue involved in the killing of five people in Texas: firearms and how easy it is for people to access them.

While it is unclear how Oropeza obtained the gun used in the shooting, the killings are the 186th mass shooting in the U.S. to date this year, according to a database curated by the Gun Violence Archive, and tied for the fifth-deadliest.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection data show a marked spike in violent-crime-related arrests among undocumented immigrants during a Biden-era surge in illegal border crossings over the past two years. But prior research on border crossings in Texas showed U.S. citizens were at least twice as likely to be arrested for violent felonies in Texas, compared with undocumented migrants.

The ability to access firearms, some argue, only helps set the stage for more shooting incidents.

"Obviously, it's a tragedy, and I certainly don't want us to get distracted from the fact that we need to limit access to a deadly firearm," Democratic Senator Alex Padilla of California, a member of the government operations and border management panel, told Newsweek Tuesday.