Ken Paxton leads a group of 15 Attorneys General in opposition to border bill

February 6, 2024 TruthUSA

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was joined by 14 other Republican AGs in opposing the bipartisan Senate border bill backed by President Joe Biden.

In a letter to Senate leadership Tuesday, Paxton and the coalition of AGs slam the bill for providing not a shred of policy that would “solve the problems Biden has created at the border.”

The Paxton letter instead encouraged Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to “return to the basics.”

“Eliminate incentives for aliens to come to the country, eliminate policies, definitions, and loopholes that allow them to illegitimately enter and stay, and credibly fortify national deportation efforts,” the letter read. “It is straightforward and simple to solve these problems and do what is right.”

Further, Paxton and the AGs place the blame for the border crisis squarely at the feet of Biden and Department of Homeland Security Director Alejandro Mayorkas.

“Biden and Mayorkas do not need new powers or new programs. They need to be held accountable for dismantling border security and for refusing to enforce the clear immigration statutes that are already on the books,” they wrote.

Paxton’s letter is too late, in that the border bill has already suffered a quick death in the Senate.

“It’s been made pretty clear to us, by the Speaker, that it will not become law,” McConnell said Tuesday during a Senate GOP leadership press conference. “It looks to me, and to most of my members, as if we have no real chance here to make a law.”

However, the letter did give Paxton and the AGs a platform to rail against five parts of the bill that puts them on the record should Capitol Hill take another swing at this, including attaching “immigration enforcement and border security to foreign aid” and “funding for ICE to pursue deportations to the other provisions in the bill.”

“If the Senate and the White House were sincere in their efforts to solve the border crisis, they would immediately work together to pass a clean, narrow funding bill solely providing appropriations to ICE to deport those in the country illegally,” they wrote about the latter.

They also objected to the billions of dollars that would be outlaid to NGOs “that have a vested interest in drawing millions of new arrivals to the United States and coordinating their resettlement around the nation.”

McConnell blamed the mood change of congressional Republicans for the quick repudiation of border policy since Senate negotiators began working on border policy four months ago. According to the Paxton letter, it’s not the mood but the policy itself.

“This bill prioritizes the interests of foreign nationals, corporate lobbies seeking cheap labor, nongovernmental organizations paid to implement the Biden Administration’s policies, and the entire open borders industrial complex over the interests of our taxpaying American citizens,” they wrote.

“It codifies countless policy objectives the Biden Administration and the open-borders lobby have sought for years. It empowers the same officials who have acted with total disregard for the people of this country instead of cracking down on their failures to enforce the law.”