Mike Lee tells Newsmax that the border crisis is the fault of Biden, not existing law.

February 6, 2024 TruthUSA

Amid the fallout of the Senate border bill that died a quick yet painful death, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, joined Newsmax on Tuesday to reiterate the “humanitarian disaster” on the southern border has everything to do with the actions of President Joe Biden and nothing to do with the “inadequacy” of existing federal law.

Regarding the failed $118 billion bipartisan border security bill, Lee said it was a predictable “unmitigated disaster” that was created by “some very poor choices” by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

But the crisis the bill was trying to solve begins and ends with the guy in the Oval Office, Lee said.

“This occurred as a result of a deliberate decision, calculated choice, made by this administration on Day 1,” Lee said on “Rob Schmitt Tonight.” “To end the remain in Mexico program; to cancel the safe third country programs, whereby people entering on land across our southern border … would be denied entry unless they had applied for and waited for their asylum claims to be adjudicated, finally, before they entered. And (Biden) just ended them.

“They welcomed people in and then started buying them plane tickets all over the country,” Lee added. “This is not acceptable, and it’s not acceptable for Republicans to be in a position of sending the message, the very false message, that our border crisis, the humanitarian disaster unfolding on our southern border, is in any way, shape or form the product of inadequacy in existing federal immigration law. It is not.”

Lee didn’t pull any punches on McConnell either.

“What happened here was an unmitigated disaster. And it was, I believe, the predictable, foreseeable and in fact, foreseen byproduct of some very, very poor choices by the Senate Republican leader,” Lee told Schmitt.

“The minute you appoint a negotiator and then instruct that negotiator to work and negotiate contrary to the expressed wishes of many, if not most, members of the Senate Republican Conference, and simultaneously to keep them in the dark … you’re creating an inevitability,” Lee said, referring to McConnell’s guidance to Republican negotiator Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla.

“This is said at an unfortunate and unfair position in which Sen. McConnell put Sen. Lankford because the minute you give him that line of instructions and tell him not to communicate with the senators, not to do as they have suggested, of course, you’re gonna have a disaster at the end of it,” Lee said.

“And of course, we’re not going to like it.”

About NEWSMAX TV:

NEWSMAX is the fastest-growing cable news channel in America!