WASHINGTON, D.C. — Ohio Sen. Rob Portman ended last week in Texas doing a ride along with Border Patrol, touring a section of the border wall, and visiting border facilities with a bipartisan group of senators and the secretary of homeland security.

He said what he saw is “unsustainable.”

“The problem here is that the Biden administration, on day one, made about a half dozen changes, and since then have made several more, that encouraged more people to come to the border, and they didn’t put anything in place to deal with it,” Portman (R-Ohio) said on CBS’ ‘Face the Nation’ on Sunday.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) (center) with members of Border Patrol in Texas last week.

Northeast Ohio Rep. Dave Joyce (R, OH-14) had similar feelings after visiting the border a few days before Portman.

“We are a country of immigrants, but we are also a country of laws, and those two don’t have to contradict each other,” Joyce told reporters during a press conference along the southern border.

Ohio Republicans are joining most of the GOP in criticizing the Biden administration for doing away with Trump-era border rules and then being overwhelmed by record numbers of migrants crossing over.

Rep. Dave Joyce (R, OH-14) (right) tours the southern border with House Republicans last week.

“His policies had a predictable outcome. We knew what was going to happen — anyone rational knew what was going to happen,” Rep. Warren Davidson (R, OH-8) said in a recent interview. “And frankly, it was already underway with the things that he promised during the campaign.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R, OH-4) had similar sentiments.

“The solution is to go back to the policies that President Trump had in place — we actually had control of the border — and not exacerbate the problem, not make the problem worse,” Jordan told Spectrum News last Friday.

Ohio Democrats said it’s not that easy.

They criticized former President Trump’s immigration policies as inhumane and argue President Biden inherited a messy situation.

“This was a problem in the Trump years, but Republicans in control never passed an immigration law,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said in an interview last week. “This is a problem now and we need both parties to come to the table and work on real immigration reform that protects our borders and respects human rights.”

The congressional debate on immigration has been going on for years with little progress being made.

Though Ohio is far from the southern border, the American Immigration Council reported 90,000 undocumented immigrants were living in the Buckeye State in 2016 and almost 4,000 DACA recipients — or “Dreamers” — were in Ohio last year.

In 2018, 6% of Ohio’s labor force was immigrant workers.

Tom Cartwright is a Columbus-based global refugee advocate who regularly visits the southern border with the group “Witness at the Border.”

Ohio-based refugee advocate Tom Cartwright (center) on a recent trip to the southern border.

In an interview Tuesday, he said he feels the Biden administration underestimated how urgently resources would be needed, but he criticized Republicans for being concerned now, but not when Trump’s policies were in effect.

“The solution, I guess, they believe would be to go back to the other administration’s policies, which would be to send those children, unaccompanied, back into cartel-controlled lands over the border in Mexico. That’s the alternative. And as far as I’m concerned, that is not an alternative,” Cartwright said in a Zoom interview from Columbus.

After his trip, Sen. Portman called for helping Border Patrol finish parts of the wall, for putting an e-verify system in place, and for speeding up the asylum trials that often take years to complete. 

Columbus-area Rep. Steve Stivers (R, OH-15) backs legislation to hire more judges.

“While I think there is some blame to go to the Biden administration, I’m willing to work with them on solutions including more funding for the courts and the judges to hear these claims quicker, and make sure that we reform asylum claims so they can’t be abused,” Stivers told Spectrum News in a Skype interview last week.