State and local leaders — like New York Mayor Eric Adams — have long criticized President Joe Biden by name when discussing the border crisis.
Sen. Jon Tester, D-M.T., has joined the chorus, too.
“When it’s harvest time, we bring in the crop. We don’t sit around and hope that somebody else will do the job for us. We handle it the Montana way: rolling up our sleeves and getting to work,” Tester, a farmer, wrote in an op-ed Sunday.
“It’s the type of mentality that my colleagues in Congress and President Biden urgently need to bring to the table to secure our border. Montanans know that what’s happening at our southern border right now is a serious problem, plain and simple.”
Tester made the remarks in the pages of The Billings Gazette, the most widely circulated paper in Montana. The senator lives in a state more than 1,000 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, but even Montanans are suffering amid drug cartels’ attempts to bush fentanyl through gaps in the border.
“When I talk to Montana sheriffs and mayors in communities big and small, they all tell me that the situation at our southern border and the deadly fentanyl crisis are having disastrous impacts on the folks they’re sworn to protect,” Tester wrote.
“The stories of those impacted Montana families, local governments’ budgets that are stretched thin, and our national security are front of mind for me when I’ve told President Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas that what’s happening on our southern border is unacceptable.”
In the past, Tester has made appeals to bipartisanship. In May, he voiced support for the bipartisan bill to extend Title 42, a pandemic-era rule allowing executives to cite public health as grounds for refusing asylum seekers.
In the op-ed, Tester slammed the Democrat-controlled Senate for failing to prioritize border negotiations before the holiday break… and he concluded by singling out Biden.
“The lack of urgency from my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to address this crisis is frankly disturbing,” Tester wrote.
“That is why I urged Senate leaders from both parties to prioritize a solution to the border crisis, one that I believe we should have stayed in Washington and worked over the holidays to solve… My message to the President and my colleagues in Congress is simple… I’m committed to working with anyone, Republican or Democrat, to get a deal done that secures our borders and protects our state and our country.”
Tester chairs the powerful Veterans’ Affairs Committee, and he’s running for a fourth term this year in a state that former President Donald Trump won by 16 points in 2020. remains the only Democrat holding statewide office in Montana.
Republican candidate Tim Sheehy has critcized Tester for failing to deliver after three terms. “You’ve had 18 years to secure the border,” Sheehy tweeted Saturday.
Sheehy added Monday, after the op-ed, “Montana is a northern border state with a southern border problem because, after 18 years in DC, Two-Faced @jontester has refused to secure the border.”
The Associated Press contributed to this article.