House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) shut down Senate negotiations of a border compromise after details of the draft were leaked online.
This week, Johnson discouraged Republican Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) 's idea of a border compromise that would allow tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid, including funding Ukraine’s prolonged war with Russia.
“Absolutely not,” Johnson tweeted with a screenshot of the reported draft.
On Wednesday, Lankford led a special Senate GOP conference meeting after addressing the Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) weekly luncheon to discuss the negotiations.
The proposed Senate deal, according to the Immigration Accountability Project, would include the following:
- Increase green cards by 50,000/year
- Work permits for adult children of H-1B holders
- Immediate work permits to every illegal alien released from custody
- Taxpayer-funded lawyers to certain UACs and mentally incompetent aliens
- Expulsion authority for a limited number of days only if encounters exceed 5K/day over seven days
- Restrict parole for those who enter without authorization between ports of entry
“If you don’t end catch and release as a policy, if you don’t reinstitute remain in Mexico if you only fix asylum or parole and not these other things, then you don’t solve the problem. You don’t stem the flow here,” Johnson said during an interview with Face the Nation, where he discussed Senate efforts to pass a watered-down bill with H.R. 2 provisions.
Absolutely not. pic.twitter.com/tkXma24r8M
— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) January 13, 2024
Johnson said that for him to consider a negotiation, the GOP-passed H.R. 2 border security bill must be the starting point of the bill.
“If it looks like H.R. 2, we’ll talk about it,” the Speaker said, adding that provisions of the bill were designed to work together to fix the immigration crisis. Johnson noted that removing one or more of the provisions would not help stem the flow of illegal migrants entering the U.S.
On the contrary, Lankford argued that expecting the Senate or the White House to support a H.R. 2 bill isn't realistic.