With less than 75 days until the November election when voters will choose a new president, 34 U.S. Senators, and the full House of Representatives complement, candidates’ rhetoric is getting fiery, and exaggeration in the quest for victory is commonplace. But flat out, purposeful misrepresentations, while not shocking, should be called out. One of the most often repeated lies is that former president Donald Trump killed the Senate border bill about which President Joe Biden said: “What’s been negotiated would — if passed into law — be the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country.”
Biden distorted the facts about the disastrous border bill; his claim that Trump torpedoed the proposed legislation is also false. The truth regarding the bill and Biden’s misstatement about Trump’s role should be examined. First, the bill wouldn’t have secured the border, but instead it would have maintained the unchecked illegal immigration level and accelerated unlawful entry. Polling consistently shows that likely voters rate border security at the top of their concerns, but the Senate proposal would codify catch-and-release, a major illegal immigration driver. Border officials would continue to release unvetted illegal aliens into the interior. Many would be granted parole, an abuse of immigration law, and rewarded with work permission—business as usual during the Biden administration. Congress imposed strictly limited circumstances in which the Department of Homeland Security may lawfully parole an alien into the U.S. and it wrote the parole statute so that it may only be used “sparingly.” Specifically, the statute only permits DHS to parole an alien temporarily into the U. S., on a case-by-case basis, for urgent humanitarian or significant public benefit reasons. The thousands of illegal aliens that have received parole do not satisfy any of the congressionally mandated considerations.
The failed bill would have required that any alien who simply requests asylum must be released before an immigration officer can evaluate his claim’s validity. More catch-and-release and more border surging would follow. The proposed Senate bill created an expulsion authority for apprehended illegal aliens, but the provision only becomes mandatory after an unmanageable total of illegal immigrants have already been released: 5,000 daily illegal border crossers over a seven-day period or 8,500 illegal aliens crossing in one day. No one can reasonably call that securing the border. The bill is chock full of more detrimental features like allocating $1.8 billion to NGOs to support processing 1.8 million illegal immigrants annually. NGOs are complicit in the border surge and profit massively from it. The criminally inept Health and Human Services which has lost track of 85,000 children would receive a whopping $2.3 billion for lawyers’ fees and other wasteful, exorbitant expenses. If HHS officials want to find the missing youths, they should head to the nation’s meatpacking plants where minors are working long hours in unsanitary conditions for low wages.
Any voter who may still wonder about the bill’s contents should remember that the chief negotiators were DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer who has a 40-year congressional history of immigration advocacy, and two U.S. Senators who have voted 100% with the administration, Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema and Connecticut’s Chris Murphy. The outfoxed GOP member that contributed the to the obligatory “bipartisanship” is Oklahoma Senator James Lankford, a patsy, whose pre-congressional background includes being an ordained Baptist minister. Mayorkas and his team ran circles around the overmatched Lankford.
As for the charge that Trump scotched the very bad bill, no tangible evidence points to that. The press picked up the administration’s “Trump killed the bill” talking point and ran with it. Center for Immigration Studies Andrew R. Arthur, a former immigration judge and a legal advisor to several House committee chairmen, put together a partial list of unprofessional journalism that helped fuel misinformation. A sampling: AP News: “Biden determined to use stunning Trump-backed collapse of border deal as a weapon in 2024 campaign,” New York Times: “Trump’s Border Intervention Gives Biden a Chance to Shift from Defense to Offense,” CNN: “Failure of border bill creates a political opening for Biden,” Time: “Biden Urges GOP Leaders to ‘Show a Little Spine’ and Stand Up to Trump on Border Bill,” The message: Biden is a good guy, defending the nation; Trump, is a bad bad and has only his self-interest at heart.
House Speaker Mike Johnson and a handful of recalcitrant Senate Democrats—California’s Alex Padilla, Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey as well as Vermont’s Independent Bernie Sanders killed the bill in a procedural vote—no amnesty, no deal. Johnson insisted that HR-2, the Secure Border Act, be included in the Senate proposal. Upon learning that HR-2 was excluded, Johnson declared the legislation, should it reach him, DOA.
As for Trump, he’s easy to become exasperated with. His most ardent admirers wish he would talk and gesticulate less. Trump’s call for more legal immigration by attaching green cards to college diplomas is an old, tired idea that’s been rejected whenever serious efforts are advanced to include it in legislation. And little wonder—the idea would be a job-killer for U.S. employment seekers. But in the Senate bill’s high stakes case, voters should remember that it pays to research. The two principal news sources on the border bill are notoriously untrustworthy, Biden and the establishment media. Trump can’t be held responsible for everything that’s gone wrong, and the border bill is an example of misplaced blame.
As Politico summed the fiasco up: “Never Mind Republicans, Biden Hadn’t Sold His Own Party on the Border Deal.”
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