Before the House votes to reauthorize the TVPRA, I urge you to insist that it actually closes the loopholes traffickers have exploited for years. Renewing the law and leaving them in place is a missed opportunity we can’t afford.

The current framework requires the government to release unaccompanied children instead of keeping families together, and cartels have turned that mandate into a smuggling tool — “renting” children to pose as fake relatives because release is all but guaranteed. At the same time, the U-visa program, created to help law enforcement solve serious crimes, has ballooned into a backlog of hundreds of thousands of petitions, each carrying a work permit and protection from removal for anyone willing to claim victim status.

This reauthorization is the moment to fix this, not paper over it. Please work with your colleagues to attach the reforms in the Secure the Border Act — ending the automatic release of children, requiring that families be detained together, restoring the U-visa cap Congress set, and limiting the program to serious crimes with real cooperation. A reauthorization that leaves these problems untouched isn’t protecting children or victims; it’s protecting a broken status quo.

A future administration could undo the Trump administration’s border security and interior enforcement gains with the stroke of a pen, and leaving the TVPRA’s loopholes in place would all but guarantee another border crisis down the road. Writing these fixes into law is how we prevent that. Americans deserve an immigration system that genuinely protects children and crime victims, and this reauthorization is your chance to help deliver it.

Greg Raven, Apple Valley, CA

Sent to:
Jay Obernolte