The White House is pressing Congress to pass the bipartisan border deal, saying it will secure the border and prevent fentanyl from reaching the United States.
“The bipartisan border security deal is the toughest, fairest, and most significant legislation to secure the border in decades,” Biden administration spokesman Andrew Bates wrote in a Tuesday memo. “And it has now earned a wide range of support, from the Border Patrol Union to the Chamber of Commerce.”
The Border Patrol union has endorsed the deal, but it faces considerable opposition from Republicans in both chambers of Congress. The top four House GOP members have said the deal fails in every policy area.
Bates’s memo accuses the GOP, and specifically House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), of hypocrisy.
“President Biden and Republicans and Democrats in the Senate have delivered what Speaker Johnson claimed he supported for months and even years: a bipartisan bill that includes ‘statutory reforms designed to restore operational control at our southern border,'” Bates wrote.
The memo lists out the deal’s benefits, including more than 1,500 new border personnel, 1,200 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel, 100 machines designed to detect fentanyl, and 4,300 asylum officers to process claims.
“But suddenly, Speaker Johnson is tying himself in knots manufacturing excuses to oppose all of those benefits,” Bates said.
He also said failure to pass the bill would signal that the GOP is more beholden to the wishes of former President Donald Trump than to border security.
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“Will House Republicans say ‘yes’ to more law enforcement like the Border Patrol, whose union supports the bipartisan deal,” the memo reads, “or will they instead say ‘yes’ to more fentanyl and to Donald Trump’s insistence that border security be delayed in the name of politics?”
President Joe Biden is scheduled to make a speech about the matter before noon Tuesday.
