WASHINGTON — The White House has seized Remarks by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that former President Donald Trump resisted accepting any bipartisan compromise to strengthen border security laws.
McConnell, R-Ky., made the comments hours before the Senate adopted a vast foreign aid program of 95 billion dollars to provide assistance to Ukraine and Israel, ending months of Republican Party infighting that resulted in no additional immigration action.
“This week, Senator McConnell explicitly explained why the strongest and fairest bipartisan border legislation in modern American history is being blocked: ‘our presidential candidate didn’t seem to want us to do anything.’” , White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in an email. THURSDAY.
“After President Biden worked with Republicans and Democrats in the Senate to reach a historic deal that secured the border and cracked down on fentanyl, Congressional Republicans made clear why many of them sided with the drug cartels and human smugglers about the Border Patrol Union and the Chamber of Commerce – because Donald Trump told them so,” added Bates, while noting the drop in crime rates at the national scale. “President Biden will not allow extremist Republican officials to endanger American communities. He will continue to fight for the toughest and fairest border security deal in decades.”
The White House’s blow to Trump and the Republicans comes amid a campaign between Biden and the ex-president. Trump has made concerns about immigration and the asylum system a central part of his pitch to voters, and polls show voters largely trust Trump over Biden on border management.
Biden attempts to neutralize his vulnerability by arguing that Trump does not care about securing the border and seeks to weaponize the issue solely for political purposes. The new White House statement indicates that Biden’s team plans to continue to build on this argument.
McConnell told reporters Tuesday, hours before the bill passed, that Trump played a role in delaying aid to Ukraine because of his resistance to a bipartisan border deal.
“I think the former president had mixed opinions on this. We all felt the border was a total disaster, including me,” McConnell said. “There was first an effort to craft a law that required dealing with Democrats, and then a number of our members I thought it wasn’t good enough. And then our presidential candidate didn’t seem to want us to do anything. It took us months to get there. So we ended up developing the originally proposed supplement, which didn’t address all the issues: it didn’t solve the border problem, but certainly addressed the growing threats of the moment.
Biden and Democrats initially rejected GOP demands to include border security in a foreign aid package. But ultimately, they reversed course and struck a deal with McConnell’s representative, Sen. James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, who called it “by far the most comprehensive border security bill conservative for four decades.
THE the bill they published would have It raised the bar for seeking asylum and included a host of triggers to turn away new arrivals, but it included none of the legalization provisions that Democrats had initially demanded as part of any immigration deal.
Trump still pressured Republicans to reject the bill, declaring on social media that “we need a strong, powerful, and essentially ‘PERFECT’ border and unless we If we succeed, it would be better not to make an agreement.
In a separate post, he wrote: “I don’t think we should make a border deal at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to end the INVASION of millions and millions of people, many of whom come from unknown parts, in our once great country. soon it will be great again, Country! »
Although McConnell defended the bipartisan bill, he has been locked by Republican obstruction, since only four Republican senators voted in favor of its adoption in February, the others arguing that it was not up to standard.
Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, the lead Democratic negotiator on the border deal, said in an interview: “This whole thing has taken way too long. But what if you’re a Democrat and at the end of the day you get all the humanitarian aid to Ukraine, to Israel – and you basically denounce Republicans on their most critical issue, immigration? Ask yourself if this is a political deal worth accepting.
“We are done with Ukraine,” he said. “And we have significantly improved our position on the issue on which we were most vulnerable in the election: immigration. »
Since then, the Biden administration has been considering executive actions to deter illegal immigration, but any unilateral action would pale in comparison to what Congress can do.