Senators Tell House Republicans To Take It or Leave It on Immigration Reform and Border Security

With Speaker Johnson and House Republicans saying they will not even touch the immigration reform and border security bill being negotiated in the Senate, lawmakers in the upper chamber have a message for House members: Take it or leave it. During a press conference on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Senator Graham told the Sun that the deal currently being hammered out by Senators Lankford and Murphy is the best shot his fellow Republicans have at making real change, and they should not wait for a Republican president to get the job done. “If you’re really a conservative person, you’ll want to fix things the best you could,” Mr. Graham said of Mr. Johnson. “To the conservative world: You have a unique opportunity, as Senator Thune described, to get border security reform without giving amnesty or a pathway to citizenship to one person. This moment will pass. Do not let it pass.”Messrs. Lankford and Murphy have been negotiating the reforms, along with Senator Sinema, since before the Thanksgiving break. Republicans are using the White House’s request for Ukraine aid as a leverage point to demand changes at the border. The most pressing issue for the GOP is the Biden administration’s parole policy, which has allowed millions of migrants to enter the country since 2021. Messrs. Graham and Thune, speaking at the Wednesday press conference, said President Biden and the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, have paroled more than 1.5 million migrants in just the last year, compared to an average of less than 6,000 annually between 2014 and 2020 under Presidents Obama and Trump. “Parole is incentivizing more illegal immigration, is the tool of choice by the Biden administration to implement an open borders policy,” Mr. Graham said. “Mr. President: There will be no deal, there will be no money for Ukraine, no money for Israel, no money for our own needs unless you stop the abuse of parole.”Mr. Thune said immigration reform has been the most intractable problem for Congress since he was elected to the Senate in 2004. This is the moment, he says, to get something done because Democrats are not demanding comprehensive changes to asylum laws that will pave a pathway for citizenship. “As these negotiations — we hope — conclude soon, there have been some significant gains made in terms of policies that are real and that reduce these ‘pull factors’ that are encouraging people to come across the border illegally,” he said. “You cannot fix the problem that we have — the crisis that we have — at our southern border unless you address this critical issue of the abuse by this administration of the parole authority.”Mr. Johnson, who is already on thin ice with his party’s conservative members because of the budget deal he struck with Senator Schumer, is taking a hard line on this proposal. He says the only viable option for addressing the border and immigration issue is for the Senate to take up his hardline immigration bill known as H.R. 2. The legislation passed the House with zero Democratic votes last year and quickly died in the Senate when Mr. Schumer refused to take it up. “Absolutely not,” Mr. Johnson said in response to the leaked details of the immigration deal, which would reportedly allow for up to 5,000 crossings at the border a day and would expedite work permits for the adult children of migrants, among other things. The House Freedom Caucus has already paralyzed the House once by voting down a rule in a protest move against Mr. Johnson’s budget agreement. They could easily do that again — or even introduce a motion to remove the speaker — if Mr. Johnson were to take up this much-despised bill. “The Senate’s Schumer-Lankford ‘border deal’ is a deal for illegal aliens — not Americans,” Congressman Andy Biggs said in response to the leaked details of the bill. “We need to be securing the border and removing illegal aliens from our country — not giving illegal aliens work permits and taxpayer-funded lawyers.”

Senators Tell House Republicans To Take It or Leave It on Immigration Reform and Border Security

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