WASHINGTON – The White House has been taken over notes Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said former President Donald Trump has resisted accepting any bipartisan compromises to tighten border security laws.
McConnell, R-Ky., made the comments hours before the Senate floor He accepted the foreign aid package of 95 billion dollars Aid to Ukraine and Israel, limiting internal GOP infighting resulting in no immigration additions.
“This week, Senator McConnell made it clear why the toughest, fairest bipartisan border legislation in modern American history has been stalled: ‘Our presidential nominee apparently didn’t want us to do anything,'” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in an email Thursday.
“After President Biden worked with Senate Republicans and Democrats on a landmark deal securing the border and cracking down on fentanyl, Republicans in Congress have spoken directly about why many of them have sided with drug cartels and people smugglers over the Border Patrol. Chamber of Commerce — because Donald Trump told them to,” Bates added, noting that the crime rate has dropped across the country. “President Biden will not allow extreme Republican officials to endanger American communities. He will deliver the toughest, fairest border security in decades. will continue to fight for the agreement”.
The White House’s attack on Trump and Republicans comes in the middle of a campaign between Biden and the former president. Trump has made concerns about immigration and the asylum system a central component of his pitch to voters, and polls show that voters trust Trump over Biden to manage the border by a wide margin.
Biden is trying to neutralize his weakness by arguing that Trump doesn’t care about border security and only wants to weaponize the issue for political gain. The new statement from the White House is an indication that the Biden team plans to continue to rely on this argument.
McConnell told reporters Tuesday, hours before the bill’s passage, that Trump played a role in delaying aid to Ukraine because he resisted a bilateral border deal.
“I think that the former president has different views on this. “We all felt that the border was a total disaster, including me,” McConnell said. “There was an attempt to draft legislation that required you to deal first with the Democrats and then with a number of our members. he thought he wasn’t good enough. Then our presidential candidate didn’t seem to want us to do anything. It took months to work on it. So we did the addition that was originally suggested, which didn’t deal with all the problems – it didn’t solve the border problem, but it certainly solved the growing threats at the moment.
Biden and Democrats initially rejected GOP demands to include border security in the foreign aid package. But they eventually caved and struck a deal with McConnell appointee Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., who called it “the most conservative border security bill by far in the last four decades.”
The it would be a bill they put out raised the bar for seeking asylum and included a number of triggers to turn away newcomers, but none of the legalization provisions that Democrats had originally demanded as part of any immigration deal.
Trump pressured Republicans to kill the bill, saying on social media, “We need a Strong, STRONG, and essentially ‘PERFECT’ Border, and if we don’t get that, we better not go to the Deal.”
In a separate post, he wrote: “I don’t think we should have a Border Deal until millions and millions of people, many from parts unknown, get EVERYTHING they need to prevent the RIGHT to our once great land. It will be great again soon, Country!”
Although McConnell defended the bipartisan bill, he blocked Since only four GOP senators voted for his advancement in February, the rest argued it fell short.
Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, the chief Democratic negotiator on the border deal, said in an interview: “This whole thing has taken too long. But if you’re a Democrat and you end up buying Ukraine, Israel, humanitarian aid, and you fundamentally expose Republicans on their most critical issue, immigration? Ask if this is a political deal.
“We finished Ukraine,” he said. “And we’ve dramatically improved our position on the issue we’re most sensitive to at the polls: immigration.”
Since then, there has been a Biden administration Taking into account enforcement actions to curb illegal immigration, but any unilateral steps would pale in comparison to what Congress could do.