Policy, politics played critical roles in failure of border bill

Over the past decade, I've made many trips to our southern border, often bringing my colleagues in the Senate down with me. On a recent trip, we had a conversation with a girl who was only 10 years old. This girl was with a man who claimed to be her father. He had his arm draped forcefully around her, and it was obvious to everyone that these two were not related. It was horrifying to leave knowing there was a very real chance that this girl, like many other children crossing the border, would be taken off to be sex trafficked.

This is the reality at our southern border. Since Joe Biden became president, Border Patrol has seen over 7 million encounters along our southern border, and many of them are children like the 10-year-old girl we encountered. Border officials also estimate that over 1.7 million “gotaways” have exploited this chaos by entering the country illegally and avoiding arrest. This is nothing short of a humanitarian and security crisis.

That's why I was proud to help lead the fight against Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's bill on the border, which was terrible by two metrics: policy and politics.

When it comes to policy, this bill would have codified a new catch-and-release policy and normalized up to 5,000 illegal crossing encounters a day. The emergency authority contained in the bill, which was supposed to tame the millions streaming over our border, would have operated for only a limited number of days per year and would completely disappear after three years. As my Democratic colleague Chris Murphy wrote in a post on X, under this bill “the border never closes.”

This bill also would have given immediate work permits to those who claim asylum and pass their initial screening, even if they entered illegally. It would have provided taxpayer-funded lawyers to unaccompanied minors, and it would have dedicated billions of taxpayer dollars to sanctuary cities and the nonprofits enabling this unprecedented level of illegal immigration. One of the provisions I found particularly egregious was that it would have stripped the jurisdiction from federal courts in Texas to hear the state's own legal challenges to some of the bill's most important provisions and instead give these cases to the left-leaning D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

This bill was also terrible politically. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said it was dead on arrival in the House, so it had no chance of passing there. If it had no chance of passing into law, what was the purpose of it? To give Democrats running for office political camouflage. Many Americans are not happy with how Democrats have handled this crisis, and a recent poll found that 68% of voters — including 50% of Democrats — believe the Biden administration should make it more difficult to enter our country illegally. This bill was designed not to secure the border, but to give Democratic

candidates the ability to say they wanted to secure the border.

If the Democrats wanted to secure the border, there are two avenues to do so. Number one, President Biden could work to secure the border any time he wants, by reinstating the Remain in Mexico policy, ending catchand-release and finishing construction on the border wall — all policies he ended upon coming into office and that, under President Trump, helped produce the lowest level of illegal immigration in 45 years. That's what Biden inherited, and he deliberately halted the policies that were successfully securing the border.

Number two, the Senate could have passed House Resolution 2, or the Secure the Border Act of 2023, which would defund catchand-release, expand detention and deportation, and mandate construction of the border wall. HR2 has the support of the House of Representatives, which passed it in May. I've introduced HR2 in the Senate, and my position has been that we should have attached HR2 to Ukraine funding, so we can secure our border and help Ukraine secure its border. What we should not do is vote to secure Ukraine's border without securing ours, which is what Senate Democrats tried to do last week. I believe Majority Leader Schumer rejected my idea because HR2 would have been effective in securing our southern border.

While we were able to stop a bad border deal in the Senate, there is a real need for Congress to act and for the president to take steps to secure the border. The border crisis is so bad that it's affecting the entire country — as Democratic mayors such as Eric Adams and London Breed can attest — but Texas bears the brunt of it. What this administration has done to the southern border is nothing short of a humanitarian crisis, a security crisis and a sovereignty crisis. We need to secure the border, and we need to do it without delay.