Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, was questioned by Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream about GOP opposition to the bipartisan border bill that failed twice in the Senate this year.
In February, a $118 billion border deal crafted by Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut and independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona was released to lawmakers. The bill included a boost in hiring border patrol agents and increasing the detention capacity of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), among other provisions.
However, it failed to reach the 60 votes needed to advance within the Senate after pushback from former President Donald Trump, who called the bill “horrendous,” and Republicans in Congress. Cornyn, along with Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, voted against the bill, and both have also endorsed Trump for president. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, and other Trump critics claimed the bill was killed by Trump so that he could run on the immigration issue. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, brought the bill for a vote again in May and it failed for a second time with a 43 to 50 vote.
“It has been a talking point that has stuck for Democrats—this idea that [former] President Trump is the one who kept the border problem alive because he told you guys not to vote for it,” Bream said to Cornyn on Fox News Sunday.
“Well, that’s just false,” Cornyn replied. “And the truth is that the Biden-Harris administration spent three and a half years dismantling all of the Trump border security policies that produced a far better outcome at the border.”
He mentioned a recent visit he took to the Rio Grande Valley in which the United States Border Patrol (USBP) said immigration “is a shell game.”
“Now the federal government, if you use the CBP [U.S. Customs and Border Protections] One app, Customs and Border Protection One app, you can schedule an appointment at a port of entry. And the Biden-Harris administration will simply usher you into the United States and give you a work permit,” the GOP senator said.
He continued: “That is a huge magnet on continued illegal immigration. So we need to return to the policies of the previous administration,” mentioning Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy—in which asylum seekers were forced to wait in Mexico until their cases were processed in the U.S.—as an example.
Bream rounded out the line of questioning by saying, “We will see, and whoever wins, White House, House, Senate, whether it’s divided or together, there hasn’t been much progress on the issue of immigration.”
Cornyn said after his vote against the border bill in February, “This is not ‘no’; this is ‘not now,'” adding, “We need a major policy shift, not a fig leaf.”
White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates told Newsweek on Sunday afternoon: “You don’t have to take our word for it. Top congressional Republicans themselves confirm that their colleagues are blocking the toughest bipartisan border deal in modern history – endorsed by the Border Patrol Union and border mayors from both parties – at Donald Trump’s insistence, because the former president is concerned that making Americans safer would undercut him politically.”
In April, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, told reporters about the situation at the southern border, “First there was an effort to make law, which requires you to deal with Democrats, and then a number of our members thought it wasn’t good enough. And then our nominee for president didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all.”
Newsweek reached out to Cornyn and the Trump and Harris campaigns via email for comment on Sunday afternoon.
Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, is seen at the U.S. Capitol on June 20 in Washington, D.C. Cornyn was questioned by “Fox News Sunday” host Shannon Bream about GOP opposition to the bipartisan border bill that failed twice in the Senate this year.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
The U.S.-Mexico border has been a major issue, especially among Republicans, in the upcoming election. Harris has been criticized by the GOP for her handling of the southern border as the number of illegal border crossings has skyrocketed in recent years. Southern states like Texas have faced the brunt of the immigration issue.
In 2021, President Joe Biden tasked Harris with leading the administration’s diplomacy with Central American countries—El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras—to address the “root causes” of migration. However, she never was in charge of border security. While illegal immigration has gone up significantly under Biden, it also increased in Trump’s last months in office after hitting a low from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Although illegal immigration remains high, there has been a dramatic decrease in illegal crossings in the past fiscal year. In October, there were 240,932 CBP encounters at the southern border compared to the 104,116 encounters in July, partly because of the executive order Biden signed in June to curb the number of asylum-seekers coming into the United States.
