Sen. Mike Lee leads opposition on border security package

To Utah Sen. Mike Lee, musician Billy Idol’s four-decade-old song “Dead On Arrival” describes how he and some other Republicans feel about the just-released $118 billion bipartisan border security bill.

Lee reacted to the text of the bill shortly after it was released on Sunday night, saying, it “feels like an elaborate practical joke.”

“But it’s not funny. Not one bit,” he said. “I cannot understand how any Republicans would think this was a good idea — or anything other than an unmitigated disaster,” he said.

Lee is one of at least 18 Republicans in the Senate who has already voiced their opposition to the proposal — while the White House, congressional Democrats and the lead negotiators on this bill push for its passage.

Sen. Mitt Romney has not taken a position on the bill yet. But amid the negotiations back in December, he said, “We’re at a rate of incursions into the country of about four million a year. That’s larger than the population of 24 of our states.”

“So, we want to solve that to secure the border,” Romney said.

Lee argued that senators shouldn’t be expected to vote on the 370-page bill within the week. On Monday, his office released a dozen reasons why the proposal, which includes funding for foreign aid and the southern border as well as immigration reform “will not secure our border.”

Sen. Mike Lee’s reasons for not supporting the $118 billion border bill

The bill would codify the Biden administration’s catch-and-release authority that allows migrants who come into the country illegally to remain in the U.S. until their court date, as Lee mentioned first on his list.

However, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., who was one of the lead negotiators on the bill, said in an interview Sunday she believes the proposal ends the catch-and-release policy.

“We’ve all seen the images on television of what’s happening in Lukeville, Arizona, and in southern Texas, where large numbers of migrants are approaching the border and being processed and kind of released into the country, sometimes with a piece of paper called a notice to appear, where they may see a judge in five, seven, 10 years. No one knows,” Sinema said.

“Our law changes that and ends the practice of capture (and) release,” she added. Through this bill, the migrants will be detained until their asylum status is verified, and should they not qualify, they will be sent back to their home country.

But Lee said the bill provides a loophole, and allows for “alternatives” to detention.

Next on Lee’s list is the “Border Emergency Authority,” which would stop asylum-seekers from entering the country but only during times when the southern border is overwhelmed with more than 5,000 average illegal crossings consecutively over seven days or 8,500 in a single day. Meanwhile, land ports would be required to process 1,400 illegal migrants every day, even during an emergency.

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., another negotiator on the bill, said he would never have agreed to allow for 5,000 crossings to be the limit. “It’s not 5,000 in. It’s everyone who doesn’t qualify out,” he told reporters.

“When we get overrun, it stops all traffic and pushes it back to Mexico and says, ‘We’re not releasing you into the country, we’re turning you around until we can actually process people,’” Lankford said.

Additionally, this border emergency authority can only be exercised for roughly six months after the first two years of the bill’s implementation, Lee said in the press release.

The bill also seeks to allot $1.4 billion to cities and nonprofits that help migrants who enter the country illegally with shelter, transportation and legal fees, provide U.S. taxpayer-funded legal counsel to unaccompanied migrant children, and immediately issue work permits to migrants after their initial asylum screenings.

According to Lee’s list, the package offers 50,000 additional green cards for family reunification and employment and approves work permits for adult children of parents on work visas, or H1Bs, which he says will increase competition for American workers.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., in his explanation of the bill online, said, “You can’t reduce arrivals at the border without allowing for more legal immigration. So, more visas!”

Lastly, as mentioned on Lee’s list, the bill does not provide immediate funding for building a border wall nor does it include provisions that require the president or the Homeland Security secretary to deport individuals.

Senate Republican negotiator frustrated with backlash

Speaking about GOP opposition to the border package, Lankford expressed his frustrations about “false information” to CNN.

He said he was amused to see lawmakers standing against the bill right when it was released when the same group of people requested to review the text for an extended period.

“It was like, so much for the weeks I need to review it. I can tell now the weeks of the review wasn’t actually to review, it was just to try to kill it, stall it,” Lankford said.

Republican House leadership united in opposition over border bill

House leadership’s position on the border bill is in sync with Lee’s position. Speaker Mike Johnson, like Lee, also said the bill “will be dead on arrival,” if it reaches the House in a post on X.

He added that it “is even worse than we expected, and won’t come close to ending the border catastrophe the President has created,” he said. “As the lead Democrat negotiator proclaimed: Under this legislation, ‘the border never closes.’”

But Republican leaders in the upper chamber are backing the bill with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., supporting it because it unlocks funding for Ukraine, a top priority of his, as Politico reported. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the bill is a “compromise.”

Per NBC News, Schumer predicted Johnson will face “huge pressure from within his caucus” to get the bill passed if the Senate greenlights it.

The White House has put its support behind the bill, calling it the “toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve had in decades.”

It has also earned endorsements from the National Border Patrol Council, as per Fox News.

In a statement, the group said U.S. Customs and Border Protections has averaged more than 6,700 apprehensions every day since Biden took office, only for those individuals to be released under the catch-and-release policy. But the latest border bill will allow border patrol agents to “remove single adults expeditiously and without a lengthy judicial review,” as historically required.

“This alone will drop illegal border crossings nationwide,” the National Border Patrol Council statement said, adding the bill is “a step in the right direction.”

National Immigration Forum President and CEO Jennie Murray said that at first glance, the bill includes positive reform, like citizenship pathways for Afghan allies and the “so-called ‘documented Dreamers,’ whose families came legally when they were children but who then aged out of their status,” as well as the necessary judicial reform for asylum cases.

“More resources are necessary at all parts of the asylum process. This bill appears to take a step in that direction,” she added.