Rand Paul Says Mitch McConnell Plans ‘Sellout’ on Border Security
The GOP’s Senate leadership is preparing to betray their voters on President Joe Biden’s migration flood, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), told Fox News on Tuesday.
The still-secret draft deal “is a sellout — it’s going to continue to allow illegal immigration ” because Democrats are threatening Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) with an aid cut-off for Ukraine, Paul said before adding:
It’s saying, “Oh, we’ll let 5,000 people come illegally a day, and then after that, we might try to stop the next 5,000 that day.” It’s completely a sellout.
But it’s because people like Senator [Mitch] McConnell care more about Ukraine than anything else — more than the border, more than anything else. He wants to send $60 billion of your money to Ukraine. On this issue, he is more aligned with Biden. On the issue of funding, of sending your money to Ukraine and sending it everywhere around the world, McConnell is much more closely aligned with Biden than he is with the Republican Party.
Paul’s comments about the 5,000 daily limit refer to a so-called “trigger” in the draft deal that would reimpose a Title 42 legal barrier when the number of migrants reaches 5,000 per day.
But 5,000 per day adds up to 1.8 million migrants per year. That inflow is one migrant for every two U.S. births.
Under the draft, those 1.8 million illegal economic migrants would be allowed into the United States via legal loopholes such as asylum and parole. Once allowed in, they would be able to take jobs and wages needed by ordinary Americans, and to compete for homes needed by American families.
The 1.8 million inflow is in addition to the annual inflow of one million legal immigrants and the inflow of many short-term visa workers. In enacted, the deal would effectively double the nation’s immigration rate under the guise of a “border security” bill.
In addition, Senate GOP leaders may also allow Biden to import hundreds of thousands of foreign workers via a novel “parole” pathway created by his deputies. They may also fund Biden’s $14 billion request to house and hide his growing population of poor migrants during the 2024 election.
A GOP betrayal of its voters on immigration likely would be lethal to the party’s future, especially because former President Donald Trump is expected to build his 2024 campaign around the issue.
The Biden-supported migrant inflow is so unpopular that half of the public — and a supermajority of Republicans — describe it as an “invasion” that burdens and threatens Americans and their society.
In contrast, Democrats are fighting to win GOP approval for legal tools and funds to manage — not reduce — their huge inflow of migrants.
“I think we are interested as Democrats in providing the administration with tools that will help better manage the border,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn), told reporters on January 9.
We are not interested in taking away from the administration [the] tools that they use today to help better manage the border. And so, when we talk about this topic of parole, it is very important to understand that it is used today as a way that the administration is able to better manage the flow [of migrants] in a planful way.
So far, the administration has managed the inflow of migrants upwards to boost investors’ stock values, but not to reduce the pocketbook damage to ordinary Americans.
Some GOP Senators are demanding caps on the number of migrants allowed into the United States via the parole loophole.
“There are a couple of ideas out there about how to deal with it but the one that seems to have a lot of support is some sort of a cap along the lines of what we do with refugees and other categories of people who come into the country,” Sen. John Thune (R-SD), told reporters on Thursday.
“There’s a real strong opinion in our conference that this issue of parole’s got to be dealt with in some way … [Democrats] understand now that we’re serious about it,” he told reporters, according to TheHill.com. Thune, who is Sen. McConnell’s deputy, did not suggest a number for the cap.
The GOP’s House leadership, led by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), has repeatedly said that the parole pathway must be shut.
Biden’s pro-migration border chief — Alejandro Mayorkas — has already used the parole loophole to pull in roughly 700,000 economic migrants for jobs and homes in Americans’ neighborhoods.
RELATED: CNN’s Culver — Number of Illegal Chinese Migrants in ’23 Nearly Doubled Past Decade’s Total, Most Economic Migrants
Overall, Mayorkas has invited roughly 5 million illegal migrants to enter or remain in the United States, via a wide variety of illegal, legal, or quasi-legal routes.
His goals are to raise the status of migrants and to help investors, regardless of the massive pocketbook damage to ordinary Americans. In December 2022, for example, Mayorkas told ElPasoMatters.org:
We look to our partner to the north that has a much more nimble immigration system that can be retooled to the [national government’s] needs at the moment. For example, Canada is in need of 1 million workers and they have agreed that in 2023, they will admit 1.4 million … immigrants to fill that labor need that Canadians themselves cannot. We are stuck in antiquated laws that do not meet our current [corporate] needs.
This goal of a cheap-labor, migrant-inflated Wall Street economy– and the use of parole to create it — is backed by the FWD.us.
The group was founded by pro-migration West Coast investors to push the “Gang of Eight” amnesty and cheap labor bill in 2013. In 2021, pushed the Senate to confirm Mayorkas as homeland secretary. The wealthy founders include Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who spent over $100 million to boost voter turnout in Democratic districts in the 2020 election.
FWD.us is rallying pro-migration groups to minimize curbs on parole migration amid signals that Biden’s deputies may accept parole curbs.
“None of this is what we should be doing,” Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, told a left-wing site, TheMessenger.com. “It’s certainly possible that a really harmful deal gets made and that would be tragic and terrible.”
Biden should not agree to rules that require the deportation of migrants or the detention of asylum seekers, said Schulte. “People are going to die if you do this — a lot of people,” he said.
Schulte’s all-out campaign to protect the parole loophole seems to have reversed the Democrats’ willingness to curb the parole loophole.
“We’ve got a couple of issues that I thought were resolved that are not resolved,” Sen. James Lankford told Semafor.com on January 8, when has was asked about parole.
The GOP Senators may not be trying to curb Mayorkas’s “CHNV” parole program which imports 360,000 people a year for jobs and wages that otherwise go to Americans.
Instead, they may only be trying to curb only the CBP One program, which is used at the border to give parole to perhaps 50,000 people per month, or 600,000 people per year.
“Lankford, after Senate GOP meeting, says the parole conversation is focused on CBP One app, where migrants can make appointments at ports of entry, seek to enter the US & receive parole,” said a January 9 tweet by Bloomberg Government.
The CHNV program was created in 2013 — likely in violation of a 1996 law — to import workers from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Those eager, lower-wage migrant workers are welcomed by many CEOs because it means they do not have to hire, pay, train, and manage the less productive Americans who have fallen out of the workforce.
McConnell Ally John Thune Pushes Senate Open Borders Deal: ‘Unique Moment in Time’
Sen. John Thune (R-SD) has locked arms with President Joe Biden in calling for a deal to surrender to unlimited migration that would include tens of billions in foreign aid to Ukraine.
The retreat would hand the White House a key election year win and surrender the best leverage Republicans have had in decades to make substantive changes in border policies that could alleviate one of the American people’s greatest concerns potentially for generations.
RELATED VIDEO — Van Hollen: Tying Border Security Biden “Pushed for for a Long Time” to Ukraine Aid Will Jeopardize Timely Ukraine Aid:
Senate negotiators have led efforts for months to pair some sort of border security package with billions of supplemental funding, primarily to advance Ukraine’s floundering war efforts against Russia. The war has been deadlocked for almost a year, with untold hundreds of billions spent and countless lives lost.
Yet hesitancy for more foreign aid and demands for a truly substantive border package from Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) Republican House led to the search for a compromise on the two issues.
Leaded details of the deal, which essentially amount to a surrender at the border, have received widespread condemnation, with Johnson indicating he will not move that bill through the House.
On Wednesday, Biden is hosting Congressional leaders at the White House to flex his muscles and pressure Johnson to surrender.
Thune’s latest position appears supportive of Biden’s tactics, insisting that the leaked deal is worth supporting.
U.S. President Joe Biden (R) welcomes President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House on December 21, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
“There is absolutely no way that we would get the kind of border policy that’s being talked about right now with a Republican majority in the Senate,” Thune told Punchbowl News leading up to Wednesday’s White House meeting. “This is a unique moment in time. It’s an opportunity to get some really conservative border [policies] that we haven’t been able to get for 40 years.”
According to Punchbowl:
Under a GOP majority and a Republican president, there wouldn’t be enough Democrats willing to give Republicans the necessary 60 votes for a border package, Thune argued. Similar efforts failed under Trump the last time, partially for that reason. Today is different: Democrats are being forced to accept Republicans’ border policy ideas because the foreign aid package, a Biden administration priority, can’t pass without them.
But for months, Thune vacillated between lip service in support of H.R. 2, with the insistence that the White House must make concessions, and concern that the entire exercise would be in vain.
In early November, as negotiations on foreign aid and border security were in their infancy, Thune said Johnson’s plan to link H.R. 2 to foreign aid has ‘a lot’ of support among Republicans in the Senate, adding, “It’d be strong.”
Migrants cross the Rio Grande into the U.S. through Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua State, Mexico, on January 2, 2024. (Herika MARTINEZ/AFP)
But within days, Thune apparently had reversed his position, saying “there isn’t anything that has been settled” when it comes to the idea of tying Ukraine assistance to specific border benchmarks.
“There is a concern — and a valid one — that anything we pass won’t be enforced by this administration,” he said. “And if you don’t have some appropriate metrics and consequences, you can put all the best policy out there but they’ll just ignore it.”
Those comments contradict Thune’s latest position, echoing his ally, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), that progress on the border in a future Trump administration would be impossible.
Despite those concerns in November, Thune appeared supportive of Senate negotiators continuing to work through the Thanksgiving recess on the Ukraine-border package and won’t wait until mid-January — when Congress faces another government funding deadline — to act on Ukraine.
WATCH — Himes: Addressing “Uncontrolled Inflow” at Border Shouldn’t Be Tied to “Existential” Ukraine Money:
And he continued his tough talk about border security, telling Fox News after the Thanksgiving break that the White House’s border security is “a complete and utter failure” and “there is no way” a supplemental will make its way out of the House and Senate “if it doesn’t address the national security crisis at our border.”
“We will insist on it,” he said.
Thune also called for the Biden administration to make some concessions in order to get a bill passed. “At some point, the White House, if they really want to get this thing done, particularly if you want to get it done by the holidays, they’re going to have to start making some concessions on some stuff,” he said.
Yet now Thune believes it is Republicans who must make concessions.
The dynamics of the government funding fight contributed to the latest strategy to reach a border-Ukraine deal.
Congress passed a continuing resolution at the end of September to avert a partial government shutdown. That deal eliminated a key opportunity to continue emptying America’s coffers in support of Ukraine, and soon after, the search for a Ukraine and border compromise kicked off.
WATCH — It’s a Shakedown! Biden, Zelensky Demand More Ukraine Money from Americans:
The White House / YouTubeFriday, when government funding once again runs out, Congress is expected to pass another continuing resolution, once again robbing pro-Ukraine lawmakers of an opportunity to ramp up funding.
That reality likely led to the current scramble to move forward with a deal on the border and Ukraine.
Some lawmakers, including Thune, are forced to thread the needle between demands of American people — across the ideological spectrum — pleading for action to stem the flow of migrants and the globalist, pro-cheap labor donor class.
The support of those donors is traditionally necessary for one to ascend to the top rung of Senate leadership.
Thune has made clear he aspires to replace McConnell as top Senate Republican.
Bradley Jaye is a Capitol Hill Correspondent for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter at @BradleyAJaye.
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