Rep. Beth Van Duyne Discusses GOP Efforts to Address Border Issues with Newsmax

Rep. Beth Van Duyne, R-Texas, told Newsmax on Monday that Democrats, not Republicans, are hampering a bipartisan effort to address illegal immigration at the southern border.

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., who is leading the GOP’s negotiation efforts on a bipartisan border bill, said in an interview last week that some Republicans “don’t want a change in law because it’s a presidential election year.”

Van Duyne, appearing “Newsline,” pushed back on claims that Republicans are resisting a deal on the border due to the presidential election.

“Look if we wanted to campaign on this, this is something that we’ve been talking about since day one, since the Biden administration took over and they sit back continue to take away all the tools that were working,” she said.

She later added that from “the first year of Biden’s presidency, we have seen our national security at risk.”

Van Duyne said that Democrats are “complaining now that they want to have policies, they knew the policies that were working … it was ‘remain in Mexico,’ it was to not catch and release but to stop people at the border, it was to take dangerous criminals that were committing crimes and deport them from from the country, and we have seen under [Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro] Mayorkas the exact opposite.”

Van Duyne said Democrats are “actually complaining now that they don’t have enough money, but the fact is, is that under the Trump administration, Homeland Security had a lot less money and they were doing a lot more with it.”