After weeks of secretive haggling, the Senate’s so-called “bipartisan border deal” is nothing of the sort.
The bill is as bad as we thought — every bit, and then some.
Details of the highly secretive “Bipartisan Border Deal,” as the National Review headline calls it, finally became public Sunday evening, but since when is a bill whose expenditure on border security is only one-sixth of its total price tag called a “border deal”? What “security” is there when Senator Chris Murphy admits, “The border never closes”?
It’s called a “border deal” because poll after poll after poll shows that the border is the one issue that the American people care about overwhelmingly. But what this bill is, if we’re bound by truth in advertising, is a Ukraine and Israel and Palestinian deal with a bit of border security sprinkled in just to placate the rubes.
The $118.3 billion legislation, which checks in at 370 pages and which could also be called The Joe Biden Reelection Lifeline bill, is as full of holes as we’d been warned about. Among the bill’s ingredients: $20 billion for border security, the end of Biden’s disastrous “catch and release” policy, an expansion of detention capacity for families, a raising of asylum standards and fast-tracking of asylum claims, 50,000 new visas over five years, and a measly $650 million to expand the border wall. Oh, and $60 billion for Ukraine, $14 billion for Israel, and $10 billion for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. We can’t make this stuff up.
James Lankford, whose motives we’ve been wondering about, and who ostensibly led Republican efforts to craft the bill but who talks about it as if he’s the subject of a hostage video, tried to pitch the bill on Fox News yesterday. “Some people are thinking that this is somehow like counting 5,000 people in every day and releasing them,” he said of the bill’s most objectionable components. “That’s absurd. We changed the asylum laws, we increased detention beds, we doubled the deportation flights, we added ankle monitors. … There’s all the things that we build into this to make this a much stronger system.”
Uh-huh. Of course, all of this assumes that the Biden administration will actually live up to its end of the bargain on border enforcement. And if history is any guide, it won’t. Just ask Ronald Reagan how Democrats abide by their immigration deals.
Lankford refers to “5,000 people” because the bill has a trigger mechanism that activates once a seven-day average of 5,000 “encounters” with border crossers is reached. But as Andrew McCarthy explains, “Encounter is the euphemism the Department of Homeland Security uses for apprehensions of illegal aliens at ports of entry and elsewhere — it doesn’t say apprehension or arrest because that would imply detention, which is not happening in most cases.” That would certainly continue under Biden, bolstered by legislation that codifies releasing migrants.
The Senate is scheduled to vote on the bill tomorrow, but it’ll likely be an exercise in futility. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is reportedly backing away from it.
So is House Speaker Mike Johnson. “I’ve seen enough,” said Johnson on Sunday night. “This bill is even worse than we expected, and won’t come close to ending the border catastrophe the President has created. … If this bill reaches the House, it will be dead on arrival.” On top of all this, a House impeachment vote on Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is scheduled for this evening.
In case Johnson’s remarks left any doubt, his fellow Louisianan, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, said, “Let me be clear: The Senate Border Bill will NOT receive a vote in the House.”
Townhall’s Katie Pavlich lists five reasons why the bill is DOA: “President Biden doesn’t need legislation to fix the border catastrophe he started; The bill provides more funding for Ukraine’s borders than the U.S. southern border with Mexico; The bill forces taxpayers to pay for attorneys to represent illegal immigrants breaking the law; The bill provides paltry funding [less than 1% of the price tag] for additional border wall construction; The legislation allows for thousands of illegal crossings to continue.” Stopping illegal crossings was supposed to be the whole point of things, right?
Former Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller has dug deeply into the weeds of the bill, and he points to some of its most insidious aspects:
The Asylum Court at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services within the Department of Homeland Security is the radical Left of the radical Left. That is the deep state of DHS. This gives them the power to rapidly grant newly arriving illegal aliens full asylum benefits. So in other words, Mayorkas is the unilateral decider of who gets asylum. What does that mean? If you get asylum, you get instantaneous access to federal welfare — such as food stamps, public housing, free healthcare. A year later, you have a green card, and four years after that, you can be a full-voting American citizen with access to chain migration and everything else American citizens get. And you certainly are not ever going to be deported.
Miller went on to warn that this legislation would completely exempt unaccompanied minors from immigration enforcement — meaning that anyone 17 or under can’t be turned away at the border, which creates an avenue into the U.S. for the gangs, the cartels, the drug smuggling, the human trafficking, and all the other lawless activity associated with unaccompanied teens.
“We need a frank discussion about what the incentive is here,” said Tennessee Republican Senator Bill Hagerty, “They’re going to continue to do this because we know how congressional seats and electoral votes are allocated. They’re allocated based on the number of people in a given state — not the number of citizens, but the number of people. The more illegals that go there, the more political power they get because the more congressional seats they get.”
Another Tennessean, Republican Congressman Chuck Fleischmann, put it this way: “I’ll never support a so-called ‘border security deal’ that increases illegal immigration, normalizes Biden’s Border Crisis, and allows thousands of illegal aliens to continue flooding into our country. The American People want border security — not fake deals that won’t secure the border.”
On Sunday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott welcomed 13 other Republican governors to Eagle Pass, which is ground zero for Joe Biden’s intentional illegal immigration disaster. “Texas is the only state in the history of the United States of America to build our own border wall,” he said. “All that we want is to enforce the immigration laws of the United States.”
As Georgia Governor Brian Kemp pithily put it there at Eagle Pass, “If our border is not secure, our country is not secure.”
In the end, we find ourselves looking at a 370-page legislative abomination with all sorts of twists and turns and cleverly engineered loopholes. But the Republican Party could’ve avoided all this by driving a very simple bargain: They could’ve demanded that Joe Biden enforce the laws that we have on the books and exercise his existing authority to close the border.
Indeed, as McCarthy notes, “Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (codified at Title 8, United States Code, §1182(f)) clearly states in pertinent part: Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants.”
What on earth does funding for Ukraine and Israel have to do with our southern border crisis and our national sovereignty?
Answer: nothing.