The Republican Party has made immigration the main argument to get Joe Biden out of the White House. During his tenure, the Border Patrol has apprehended a record number of migrants each year: 1.73 million in 2021, 2.37 million in 2022 and 2.47 million in 2023, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security. Based on these figures, which do not represent the number of real migrants, but the number of times they have been intercepted, the ultra-right has succeeded in installing the idea that the president is allowing an “invasion” in this country built, precisely, by migrants.
However, while a migration pact between Democrats and Republicans is being prepared in Congress, one of the strictest in history, Donald Trump has emerged as the baron of his party to dynamite it. The former president and likely Republican candidate for the White House has not read the text of the legislative proposal, since it does not yet exist, but he dares to criticize it like no one else: “As the leader of our party, there is zero possibility to support this horrible betrayal of open borders in the United States,” he said at a campaign event in Las Vegas.
Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, has announced that the legislative proposal will be ready for a vote next week. It is expected to include extraordinary powers for the president to completely close the border when it is overcrowded, end the practice of releasing migrants detained after crossing the US illegally and make the country’s asylum system more restrictive.
A series of measures that the Republican Party has long supported, but they have a problem: It’s an election year. Trump will not allow Democrats to take credit for passing one of the most restrictive immigration laws in history. One of the pillars of his campaign is that it is necessary to stop the entry into the country of “rapists”, “terrorists” and “drug traffickers”: a rhetoric that he already used in 2016 to win the elections and that he has redoubled with a view to the elections of November
“They are using this horrible Senate bill to put the border disaster on the backs of the Republicans,” argues the Republican leader, as his wish is to continue holding the Democrats responsible for the increase in migrants. However, the increase is not so much due to the action of the Biden Government – which has not changed, in essence, Trump’s immigration policy – as the situations of poverty, violence, climate change and political persecution that flee in origin Specifically, the data indicate that the number of people from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Haiti has skyrocketed.
Biden sent an emergency request in October for $106 billion, which included $61 billion in additional assistance to Ukraine and $14 billion to Israel. But Republicans, reluctant to keep the flow of money to Kyiv open, after months of stalemate on the battlefield with Russia, made their approval conditional on a law to secure the border with Mexico.
After three months of negotiations and concessions, Democrats and Republicans are close to a deal, but Trump is using his growing influence in Congress to make it fail. The tycoon has the manifest support of 137 of the 219 Republican legislators in the House of Representatives and 31 of 49 in the Senate. The law is expected to be approved in the Upper House, dominated by Democrats, but the Republican majority in the Lower House is ready to thwart it.
The president of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, was elected in October after the boycott – also promoted by Trump – of the previous president, Republican Kevin McCarthy. After months confident of reaching a migration pact, in January he changed his speech, after the ex-president’s rejection: “If the rumors about the content of the proposal are true, he will have died as soon as he reached the Chamber”, he ensure last week
But not all members of his party agree with the followership of Trump, such as Dan Crenshaw, congressman for Texas, who denounced on Thursday that his group mates are “desperately trying to sabotage the agreement”. “They make it look like the rest of us are against the bill, but that’s not true,” he added, “I want to secure the border: that’s what I told my voters I would do.”
