(TND) — The union representing thousands of Border Patrol agents has endorsed the bipartisan Senate deal to address immigration and border enforcement as part of the larger national security supplemental funding bill requested by the White House.
The National Border Patrol Council, which has been repeatedly and openly critical of President Joe Biden’s handling of the border, urged quick passage of the bill.
“While not perfect, the Border Act of 2024 is a step in the right direction and is far better than the current status quo,” union President Brandon Judd said in a statement.
But experts doubt the union’s endorsement will sway Republican holdouts in Congress.
“I doubt it sways them, but it does give them a question to answer for,” Casey Burgat, the Legislative Affairs Program director at The George Washington University, said of Republican lawmakers who might oppose the bill.
Burgat said the union’s support for the border bill “removes some political cover” for Republicans who go against it while also raising concerns over what they say are inadequate border enforcement policies amid an influx of migrants.
Republican Sen. James Lankford, of Oklahoma, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, and independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, spent four months hashing out the details of the deal, which was released this weekend.
They say their border bill reasserts control of the border, protects border communities and disrupts the flow of fentanyl. They say it solves the border “crisis” by ending catch-and-release policies, strengthening our asylum system, enhancing security and improving the legal immigration system.
“This is ending catch-and-release,” Lankford told CNN on Monday. “It dramatically increases the ability for detention. It has a way to be able to monitor and to be able to track those individuals if we ... can't actually have enough space to be able to actually hold them.”
Lankford said the bill provides the current and future presidents with new enforcement tools.
And he called it a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to close our open border.”
A record 302,000 southwest border crossings were recorded in December.
That was an average of around 10,000 people per day.
The bill would allow the government to shut down the border when migrant encounters reach an average of 5,000 per day over a week.
It also streamlines asylum processes, so cases are decided in six months or less.
“This will allow us to remove single adults expeditiously and without a lengthy judicial review which historically has required the release of these individuals into the interior of the United States. This alone will drop illegal border crossings nationwide and will allow our agents to get back to detecting and apprehending those who want to cross our borders illegally and evade apprehension,” Judd, who represents the Border Patrol agents, said in a statement.
The border agreement is part of a $118.3 billion supplemental funding package for national security needs, including $60.6 billion for Ukraine and $14.1 billion for Israel.
Biden supports the Senate’s border deal, calling it the “toughest and fairest set of border reforms in decades.”
But Biden’s likely general election opponent, former President Donald Trump, is lobbying his party’s lawmakers to reject the deal.
“The ridiculous ‘Border’ Bill is nothing more than a highly sophisticated trap for Republicans to assume the blame on what the Radical Left Democrats have done to our Border, just in time for our most important EVER Election. Don’t fall for it!!!” Trump posted on social media.
While Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, supports the bill, his House counterpart, Speaker Mike Johnson, told Fox News that the bill is “dead on arrival” in his chamber.
Burgat said Trump’s voice is enough of a dominant force within the Republican Party to “kill the bill, or at least stall it to ad nauseam.”
“It's hard to get a bipartisan solution on anything controversial, and immigration is at the top of that list,” Burgat said.
But Trump, not the union for the Border Patrol agents, seems to have more influence over Republican lawmakers. And the border bill might not even get out of the Senate given its likely demise in the Republican-controlled House.
Oklahoma State University politics professor Seth McKee said this is “playing politics at its worst moment.”
McKee said Trump wants immigration as a campaign issue as he seeks a return to the White House.
“This is just base politics at its ugliest in terms of not doing something because you're trying to get an advantage politically rather than trying to solve a problem,” McKee said.
But both Burgat and McKee said the strategy has the potential to backfire on Republicans if Democrats can successfully argue that they were willing to do something to get tougher on the border when Republicans were not.
“I think it's a problem for Republicans, because you can easily run the ads,” McKee said.
He said it’s unrealistic for either party to hold out for what they view as the perfect immigration bill, as any agreement on the issue will always be “messy.”
Burgat said immigration is probably Biden's biggest electoral vulnerability.
But voters might see Republicans as the party that killed an opportunity to address some of their concerns.
Democrats might not run “on immigration specifically, but the fact that they're trying to do something with the power they wield,” Burgat said.
And, if Republican lawmakers sink the border deal, it gives Democrats “an arrow in their quiver, where before it was just a weight hanging around their necks,” he said.
CNN asked Lankford, the Republican negotiator, about Trump’s opposition.
“He has a different job than I have right now,” Lankford said of the presidential candidate.
“Obviously, a chaotic border is helpful to him in the process on that,” Lankford added.
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