House Republican leaders on Monday rejected outright the Senate border deal that was announced Sunday night, casting the proposed legislation as a giveaway to Democrats who are refusing to reckon with the scale of the crisis at the border.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Whip Tom Emmer, and Chairwoman Elise Stefanik issued a statement declaring the bill, “DEAD on arrival in the House.” They noted that the measure, is “riddled with loopholes that grant far too much discretionary authority to Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who has proven he will exploit every measure possible, in defiance of the law, to keep the border open.”
The proposed bill ties the border-security measures to $60 million in aid for Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel.
Republicans are currently attempting to impeach Mayorkas as Secretary of Homeland Security, accusing him of dereliction of duty for presiding over the highest level of illegal immigration in history. Border Patrol had a record 2.4 million encounters with illegal immigrants last fiscal year.
The Senate bill, which President Biden signaled his support for, also “fails in every policy area needed to secure our border and would actually incentivize more illegal immigration,” the leaders wrote.
Johnson on Tuesday preempted the joint statement with his own repudiation of the bill, which he said was “worse than we expected, and won’t come close to ending the border catastrophe the President has created.”
The bill compels the Department of Homeland Security to turn away all migrants at any point of entry, legal or otherwise, once officials apprehend a seven-day rolling average of 5,000 border crossers per day. In addition to mandating a border shutdown at 5,000 daily encounters, the bill grants the president the authority to invoke that measure at 4,000 encounters per day.
Republicans object that the stipulation of a trigger number would allow an unacceptable level of illegal immigration to continue unimpeded. They also complain that to agree to such a concession would reward the Biden administration’s flouting of existing law, such as the requirement that all illegal aliens be detained.
However, Senate Republicans in favor of the bill argue that it, though compromise legislation with Democrats, offers some “conservative wins,” as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office described it.
“The Border Act closes the asylum loophole,” his office said. “Right now ‘asylum’ is a magic word that lets aliens stay indefinitely in the United States. The Border Act places asylum seekers in expedited removal to screen them all within 90 days and deliver final judgments within 180 days — as opposed to the decade or more that it currently takes.”
House GOP leaders in their Monday statement disagreed, stating that the bill fails to stop Biden’s “abuse of parole authority and provides for taxpayer funds to fly and house illegal immigrants in hotels through the FEMA Shelter and Services program.” Biden has been paroling illegal aliens into the country even though he lacks such parole authority. One consequence is that politicians like New York City mayor Eric Adams, whose city has been overwhelmed by illegal immigration, has claimed that most of the migrants NYC has received are “legal.”
Some Trump allies in the House are opposing the deal for the provisions that send more funding to Ukraine. The bill also includes aid for Israel. Trump has also been pressuring his allies in the Senate to scrap the deal, possibly because if passed it could generate the impression that Biden is finally cracking down on the border crisis, diminishing the issue in the minds of voters.