The Daily Signal - What's Really in Senate's 370-Page 'Border Bill'

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

The Senate released the text of a 370-page spending bill Sunday that includes about $20 billion for border-related provisions and $60 billion for Ukraine.  The bill was originally intended to be a bipartisan compromise giving Democrats the Ukraine funding they have advocated for, and Republicans the border-security measure they have called for. But border policy experts say the bill does nothing to stop the flow of illegal immigration.  Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations for the Immigration Accountability Project, and Mike Howell, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, join "The Daily Signal Podcast" to explain what is, and is not, in the Senate’s bill. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.) Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, February 6th. I'm Virginia Allen. The Senate has introduced a bill that includes 20 billion for border-related provisions. That bill also includes about 60 billion in aid for Ukraine and 14.1 billion in aid for Israel. But we've been hearing a lot about this bill since it was released on Sunday night. And both Republicans and Democrats are expressing concerns over it. Specifically, Republicans say it would do nothing to end catch and release and secure America's border. So what's really in this bill? Well, today I am sitting down with the Director of Government Relations for the Immigration Accountability Project, Rosemary Jenks, and Mike Hal, who serves as director of the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project. We discuss what is inside this bill and if it would do anything to secure America's borders. Stay tuned for our conversation after this. We're all guilty of it, spending too much time on the internet watching silly videos.

But it's the 21st century, and maybe it's time for a change. At the Heritage Foundation YouTube channel, you'll find videos that both entertain and educate, including virtual events featuring the biggest names in American politics, original explainers and documentaries, and heritage experts diving deep on topics like election integrity, China and other threats to our democracy, all brought to you by the nation's most broadly supported Public Policy Research Institute. Start watching now at heritage.org slash YouTube, and don't forget to subscribe and share. It is my pleasure today to be joined by the Director of Government Relations for the Immigration Accountability Project, Rosemary Jenks and Mike Hal, director of Heritage's Oversight Project

right here at the Heritage Foundation. both so much for being here. It's a pleasure. We are talking about a big issue. That is the Senate border bill, what's in it, what's not in it. And before we dive into that, though, Rosemary, I want to give you just a second to share a little bit about your organization. You guys are new on the scene tackling this issue of border and immigration. Share what your mission is, what you guys do. Thank you. The Immigration Accountability Project is going to do hopefully exactly that and hold members of Congress accountable for their actions and inactions on the immigration issue as a whole, including border security. We are using social media as our primary tool,

both to reach members of Congress directly and to reach their voters. We basically want voters to understand what their elected officials are doing on the immigration issue so that, you know, when someone like Senator Langford goes home to Oklahoma, his neighbors are coming out and asking him, what is with this bill that you introduced? So that's the goal. And we are, at our website is iAproject.org and our Twitter account, which is our most active of the social media, although we're on a bunch of them, is I underscore A underscore project. Excellent. Great. Well, we will be sure to put all the links in the show notes so our listeners can find that information. But let's go ahead and talk about that bill. This has been touted as a bipartisan bill that was worked on in

the Senate. Senator Langford really spearheaded as far as on the Republican front. It was introduced late Sunday night. The bill provides about 20 billion for border-related issues. In your assessment, what's the end goal of this bill? You know, I have a hard time answering that. I'm kind of at a loss for words because I don't really understand the end goal of this bill. This was supposed to be a negotiation where the Democrats said, we want Ukraine funding. And the Republicans said, okay, we'll give you Ukraine funding if you give us border security. But what happened instead is that the Republicans went in and said, well, we all want Ukraine funding. So now let's talk about what you'll accept on border security. And that meant that essentially

Senator Lankford was negotiating with the Biden administration, with Secretary Mayorkas, with Kirsten Sinema, Democrat from or independent, I guess, from Arizona, and with Chris Murphy, Democrat from Connecticut. And he was completely outnumbered and played. played on this and we ended up with a whole lot of Ukraine funding and basically useless border security package that will not secure the border, will not end, catch and release, hands out billions of dollars to NGOs and sanctuary cities to, you know, continue to fund the transportation of illegal aliens across the country. And so it doesn't actually solve anything. Okay. Now that's a big one. you said it does not end catch and release.

That's an issue that is a major issue, especially conservatives when you ask them, what do we need to secure the border? They say end catch and release. That's basic. You don't release folks into the interior of the United States after they have crossed the border illegally. Mike, what does this bill do in terms of detaining illegal aliens? If it's not ending catch and release, does it address that at all? Sure. So we got to stop calling this thing a border bill.

It is not a border security bill. It's chalk full of giveaways, codifying basically amnesty practices into law, visa giveaways, money to sanctuary cities, far left dark money, nonprofits, et cetera. But on the catch and release point, if you look up Senator Langford's press release, he calls this detain and deport. On the Fox News Sunday shows, he was saying this ends catching release. Same thing goes for Senator Sinema. That is absolutely not true.

It is a misinformation of the highest order. what this text actually does is, you know, codifies an industrial scale mass release program. So they're really transgendering the term catch and release. What it does is illegal comes in. Okay, they're released, keyword released, with monitoring. They're going to slap ankle monitors on this flood of illegal aliens. Well, what happens after that? We've shut down ice under the Biden administration, so there's no removal mechanism.

We know that illegal aliens don't show up to their court hearing. So what good is an ankle monitor that certainly doesn't count as detention? They're going to try to confuse people into thinking that an alternate to detention is detention. It's really Orwellian, but they recognize the bill's fatal flaws. That's why they're, you know, with this misinformation point, pushing the ending catch and release, which is absolutely not true. Okay. Let's talk numbers for a second. We've heard a lot on social media in the news about how many illegal aliens under this bill.

are permitted into the United States. The number 5,000 has been thrown around a lot. Senator Langford came out and said, no, no, no, this isn't actually designed to allow 5,000 illegal aliens into the U.S. daily. What is the truth here? What are the facts? How many illegal aliens are permitted into the United States daily under this bill? Rosemary, I would like to start with you.

And then, Mike, please jump in if you have any to add. So I would at this point say that 5,000 is a minimum number of illegal aliens who will be allowed into the United States under this bill. Essentially, what it does is it says that supposedly creates a border shutdown mechanism so that if there are 5,000 illegal encounters per day over a seven-day period, the Department of Homeland Security mandatorily must shut down the government. And I would be putting shut down in air quotes if you could see me. But the problem is that that 5,000 number doesn't count unaccompanied alien children who the government is actually trafficking into the United States.

It doesn't count other victims of trafficking. It doesn't count people who actually have a credible fear for asylum purposes. And there are various other categories that it doesn't count. And the other thing, of course, is that Secretary Mayorkas, who's being impeached in the house, is the one counting. So we're relying entirely on him to tell us if there are 5,000 qualifying illegal aliens coming across the borders illegally. And so essentially, even when that shutdown happens, the Customs and Border Protection is still required, mandated to process 1,400, a minimum of 1,400 illegal aliens per day at Ports of Airs. entry on the southern border. So it's a shutdown, but there's still 1,400 minimum coming through the boards of entry

illegally. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. Well, and I'd love for either of you to clarify this. So if an individual comes to the border, says, I'm here to claim asylum, they're not counted in that 5,000 daily number, correct? That is what the legislation seems to do. Again, it's written so unclearly that it's really difficult to tell what the intention is. So we're trying to figure out what it would actually do, practically speaking, and that's what it looks like.

Okay. Mike, let's talk money. How much money is this providing, is this bill providing to sanctuary states, to sanctuary cities that have have opened the flood gates wide and said, illegal aliens, you can come here and stay here. Right. So the exact number is a little hard to track down. We need to dive deep into the appropriations text of this. But at a high level, this is north of $10 billion or $10 billion total for a border supplemental. So Americans should ask themselves, what money, what does money go towards? What money do you need for border security? The wall is obviously one area, but this

bill doesn't build new wall. And so the money that the federal government uses in this space and why they came to Congress to ask for more of it is two major categories. One of it is paying off the dark money, far-left groups that are nonprofits that facilitate the border crisis. The same groups that recruit people to the U.S. who lobby for open borders, who sue administrations for enforcing laws, are the same groups that get a ton of money to process illegal aliens throughout the country. We've been hammering that point for a while here at Heritage, and the House bill, HR2, actually defunds the entirety of that effort. So instead of defunding that, effort, the Senate bill gives them a huge, huge payday. It's well over a billion dollars a year.

As it exists now, this bill will supercharge that. With regard to sanctuary cities, this is what the mayors of New York, Chicago, etc., were given Biden such a hard time about. That's why they were at the White House, basically saying, we need more money to deal with this crisis that you created. So I hesitate to give you the exact figure right now, but that's a significant pot of that, you know, $10 plus billion. We'll go to sanctuary cities to, in turn, pay for the contractors they hire to deal with, you know, the migrant illegal alien crisis. Keep in mind, though, that over less than a year ago, actually, Senator Lankford introduced a bill to ban any and all money going to sanctuary cities.

So you have Senator Lankford on the record with, I think, about 20 other Republicans saying, here, here's what we want to do with sanctuary cities. We want to end all money to them. And then less than a year later, he comes out with the bill to give them the biggest payday of their lives. And so for that reason alone, this is a flip-flop of epic proportions. And I think American people, you know, understand sanctuary cities are bad and will be very confused why politicians tell them when they're campaigning for office that they're going to

end that practice. And then when they get in there, give them a huge payday. It's atrocious. What do you make of a flip-flop like that, Mike? I think it's really, really unfortunate. This issue on border and immigration is the number one issue for Americans because they are so sick and tired of seeing their country being invaded. And furthermore, Americans trust strong, you know, border enforcement policies more than the left-leaning open borders. The delta on that

discrepancy is bigger than ever. I think Senator Lankford and others, you know, got pushed into this bipartisan negotiation and for lack of a better term, got absolutely worked and ended up with a package that not only makes a border crisis worse, but gives the Biden administration a huge talking point where they can, you know, blame congressional inaction or President Trump for it, which couldn't be further from the truth. And so this is kind of what happens when you lock out the border security team that President Trump relied on to actually control and secure the border to the, you know, most secure in American history. And instead, you start negotiating with the architects of the crisis in Alejandro Mayorkas and some far left senators in Chris Murphy and

cinema. They had no right or reason to be rewriting our nation's immigration laws. But Senator Leifford gave them the pen and they've done it tremendous amount of damage. Rosemary, one of the issues that we hear Democrats talk a lot about is a need for work permits for illegal aliens and they bring that up as a solution to the issue. I know that this bill touches on that. What does it say in relation to providing illegal aliens with opportunities for work? So before I say that, I just want to point out one of the true irony is about what Mike was just talking about.

And that is that if this bill does what the sponsors say it will do, which is end, catch and release and stop the illegal border crisis and, you know, all of that, then why do we need to pay the NGOs, these billions of dollars, to transport illegal aliens around the country? Because presumably there wouldn't be illegal aliens who needed transport, right? I mean, you know, there's some common sense problems with this whole thing. in terms of work permits, this is one of the things that the Democrat mayors and of sanctuary cities have been screaming about is that it would be really great if you could just give them immediate work permits so that they're not a drain on our tax coffers and instead they can go find low paying jobs and compete with poor Americans for jobs. So the negotiators of this bill listened and it actually says that rather than having to wait 180 days before they, can apply for a work permit, illegal aliens, upon release from custody, will get a work permit. So as soon as they say, I have a fear of persecution or I'm going to be tortured if I'm sent home or whatever the danger is, then they are given a work permit and transported by the NGOs

to the sanctuary city of their choice, where they will be competing with poor Americans for jobs. What are we seeing as far as the response to this bill, both from Democrats and from Republicans? I'll have you both way and Michael, start with you. Well, I think the response has been what we expected. Patriotic Americans are really upset. I mean, the border, as we just said, is the top issue to them, and they see a sell-out of effort proportions. And I think that's really scaring off members who otherwise would have supported this. I think basically leader McConnell, by empowering Lankford to do this,

deal has kind of left him out on a ledge. And, you know, Senator Lankford had a state senator in Oklahoma issue a censure motion on him. And so the people of Oklahoma are absolutely upset. And other senators are seeing that reaction and saying, I want no part of this. And you have the Speaker of the House Johnson saying they won't take it up in the House. So if you're a senator, why would you, you know, touch this mess when you know it's dead on arrival in the House? So hopefully this bill does not get out of the Senate. It's looking at it. like a lot of people that are coming out are coming out in opposition. But, you know, we're staying on this and keeping a close eye and putting out information. So, you know.

Rosemary, any thoughts on the responses that we've seen? Yeah, I just think it is valuable to watch the fact that the sponsors of this bill have so little faith in the American people and their common sense that they really do believe that they can dupe the American people into thinking that this is good legislation. You know, when we first, my organization first reported three weeks ago some of the details that would be in this bill. The sponsors called us liars and said it was internet rumors and Russian disinformation and all this other nonsense.

And of course, everything we said is true. And the American people saw that and they know that these senators lied to them. Wasn't us who lied to them. And they get it. You know, the American people understand that if you don't stop catch and release, you don't stop the border crisis. If you don't reinstitute the Remain in Mexico policy, you don't stop the border crisis. You can't just throw money at NGOs and think that more illegal aliens are not going to come. So there's a whole lot more common sense out there than these senators are giving people credit for.

And God bless every American who is standing up and saying no to this. Is there any argument to be made that, you know, even though this bill is very far from perfect, it's maybe a small step in the right direction. What do you think? No. There is, it is just not true to say that doing something is always better than doing nothing. In some cases, doing nothing is the better outcome. In this case, this bill does more harm than good. This bill would tie the hands of a future administration to actually.

actually secure the border. This bill will not secure the border. And what it essentially does, and Mike has been making this point beautifully, it basically gives Republicans ownership of the border crisis. It says, it confirms essentially, well, you know, the Biden administration doesn't have the authority that he needs to actually secure the border, which is completely untrue. President Trump secured the border with exactly the same tools that the Biden administration has at their disposal. And yet this is Republicans in the Senate now saying, oh, well, he can't do it unless we give him this legislation.

False. It's false and we don't need to fall for it. So, Mike, Biden could secure the border if he wanted to. Oh, absolutely. And thank you, Rosemary, for saying it was a beautiful point. I didn't know I had the capacity to do anything beautifully. But yeah. So Biden inherited the most secure border of our lifetime.

Okay. That's indisputable. The very first things he did, you know, from the White House, were a series of executive actions to undo that, followed by regulatory actions and litigation. I mean, right now, he's literally having his DOJ fight Texas from putting up razor wire to secure their own border. He could, and Speaker Johnson has made this point and pointed out to him exactly which actions he could take. But at a high level, you restart ice. He shut down ice. When illegal aliens know they're not going to get removed, it's a massive pool factor for them to come here.

He could restart border wall construction. He could restart the Remain in Mexico program. He could stand down on all the lawsuits he's in to fight states that are trying to secure their border. I mean, I think our count has around 94 executive actions he took to create and sustain this crisis. This is the same laws we're available to Trump that are available to Biden. And Biden has the worst border crisis in U.S. history. And it's because he wants it. It's because the people around him wanted this.

This is a political move for the far left. They believe that this helps them electorally. And I think, you know, Americans see this as what it is. It is a constitutional crisis of the highest order. Never before in our nation's history has a president willingly given up sovereignty of the United States for a political purpose. If you think back to what they impeach President Trump for on that phone call with Ukraine, the whole narrative was, oh, he betrayed national security for partisan politics. Okay, that was clearly, you know, baloney.

but the same fact pattern holds here at the border. Biden has given up national security. No one can argue that. There are terrorists streaming across the border right now, and he's done so for partisan reasons because he thinks this helps him politically. That to me is unrivaled in United States history of just absolute betrayal.

There's some other words that are on the tip of my tongue that I won't use, but one of them starts with a T. I'll let the audience guess which one it is. Rosemary, would you agree with that assessment that this is a political game that's being played and that the actions have been intentional by the Biden administration with political ends in mind. Without question.

There's just absolutely no doubt. I mean, the fact that President Biden's first actions on his first day of office were to reverse Trump policies on immigration and thus open the borders. And within a week, he actually presented to the Senate, I think it was within a week. His legislative solution, and I put that in air quotes again, to the immigration problem, which was amnesty literally for every single illegal alien in the United States.

That was what he wanted. And so he made his views very, very clear. He was clearly trying to play to the progressive wing of his party. He did that very successfully. The resulting chaos at the border was absolutely to be expected. and it wasn't just that, you know, they all of a sudden had this unintended consequence. They watched it develop. They watched it build into record-breaking, literally record-breaking.

We have never in our nation's history had these kinds of numbers of illegal aliens coming across. And they continued to let it happen and let it happen and let it happen until they started having these Democrat mayors and governors start screaming because their safety nets were being overloaded. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, well, Republicans, we need more authority. You know, it is purely political. It is a ploy. And we need to just say no, secure the border. Just do it. Rosemary, what happens next? How Speaker Mike Johnson has already said this bill is dead on arrival. There is actually senators, both Republican and Democrat, that have come out in opposition to this bill already. What are we going to see play out in the coming days and weeks? My hope, and this is probably not what will happen, but my hope would be that Senator Schumer decides that there is not enough floor time in the Senate to waste on this and just polls the bill and they don't even have votes on it.

I do not believe that they can get, I don't think there's any chance that they can get half of the Republicans in the Senate to vote for this. and that was the kind of line in the sand that Senator Langford and Senator McConnell drew that would supposedly pressure the House into having a vote on this. They know that it will not get a vote in the House. So there's no reason for Republicans in the Senate to put their to attach their names to this. So, you know, the best option would be for them to just pull the bill and pretend it never happened and go on about their lives. but they probably will end up having a vote of some kind. Hopefully it will actually fail in the Senate.

And, you know, there are at least a handful of Democrats who are going to vote against this. So because it doesn't include amnesty. But yeah, hopefully we can actually, this will actually die in the Senate before it ever comes out. Yeah. I want to get last thoughts from both of you, big takeaways that Americans need to know, anything we didn't touch on. And as people are having conversations with friends around the dinner table, what are some of these big issues that should be top of mind for Americans? Michael, I'll start with you. Right.

This is the swamp at its worst. This is what happens when, you know, senators get in closed-door meetings with far-left actors and, you know, try to jam up the country on a border bill released late on on a Sunday night. And so there needs to be accountability for those who put us in the situation. I agree with what Rosemary just said about, you know, the outcomes here. But the best outcome is actually a pretty bad one. Senator Langford gave the Biden administration the talking point. They covet so much that it's, you know, congressional inaction to blame it and not Biden. And so I expect Senator Langford will be getting a fruit basket from the Biden campaign pretty soon.

And that's the net effect of what happened. And, you know, with all this politics, what didn't happen was our border being secured. There are empty tables around this country for families who have lost loved ones, the scourge of illegal immigration, whether it's gang violence or the drugs that they bring with them in the fentanyl crushing this country. And instead of taking those concerns seriously, what we have is basically the effect of a political campaign gift to the Biden administration. It's a real, real shame. Rosemary, final thoughts?

I would just like to bring this all back to HR2, the bill that the House of Representatives passed in May of 2023. HR2 was about closing loopholes in existing law. It wasn't about giving new authorities. It was purely about forcing the administration to do under current law what it didn't want to do by closing the loopholes. This bill in the Senate is purporting to give new authorities. It is supposedly trying to fix a problem that it doesn't even identify, let alone fix. So let's go back to the basics and let's go back to a principled discussion of what policies would actually help

in our immigration and border security system. And let's focus on those. And, you know, if Democrats don't want to do the right thing on this issue, then let's call them out on it. Let's not give them room to cover up their actions and their deeds on this. People need to be held accountable. And it is really important. This is an issue that's going to affect America for generations now.

We're going to have to deal with these millions of people who have come illegally into our country and are here. And this is something, it's not, you know, it's not just a game. This is serious. And we've got to figure out a way to deal with it in the next administration for sure if this administration is going to continue to abdicate its responsibility. Rosemary Jenks of Immigration Accountability Project and Mike Hal of the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project. Thank you both for your time. Really appreciate it. Thank you. And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Thanks for joining us here on the Daily Signal podcast. Again, if you want to learn more,

about the Immigration Accountability Project, you can look up iAproject.org. Again, that's iAproject.org. Make sure that you join us this afternoon for our top news edition around 5 p.m. And if you haven't done so, take a minute to subscribe to the Daily Signal Podcast. You never miss out on new shows and take a minute to leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks so much for being with us today. We'll see you right back here around 5 p.m. for our top news edition. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation.

Executive producers are Rob Luey and Kate Trinco. Producers are Virginia Allen and Samantha Asheris. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. To learn more, please visit DailySignal.com.