FAIR Leads the Effort to Include Border Security in Foreign Aid Package
During the first three months of the new fiscal year, which began on Oct. 1, the crisis at our border grew worse, while the dangers posed by the crisis grew exponentially greater. Against the backdrop of explicit threats by our enemies to attack the United States and dire warnings by numerous national security officials, FAIR and allies in Congress recognized an opportunity to enact meaningful legislation to address the border crisis in the aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act, which was passed by the House of Representatives in May, provides the blueprint for ending the Biden Border Crisis. Among other things, the bill adds manpower, infrastructure and technology needed to secure the border, and also legislative language to curb massive asylum fraud, ensure illegal aliens are detained and removed, and end the Biden administration’s flagrant abuse of parole authority. That bill has languished in the Democratic controlled Senate, even as encounters of illegal aliens at the border soared to unprecedented levels of more than 300,000 a month, and set a single-day record of more than 12,000 in December.
FAIR twice led efforts to include H.R. 2, or significant portions of it, in the two Continuing Resolutions (CR) that have been funding the federal government since Oct. 1. In both cases, Congress opted not to risk a government shutdown and omitted border security from the CRs.
In October, President Biden requested supplemental funding to assist Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan in protecting their own security. Included in that request was $13.6 billion he claimed would be used for U.S. border security. Analysis by FAIR quickly revealed that the administration’s request was not for border security, but for additional resources to process and release illegal aliens more quickly. However, the administration’s tacit admission that the border is out of control presented an opportunity to include actual security measures, such as those spelled out in H.R. 2.
FAIR immediately called for H.R. 2 to be included in the foreign aid package that the White House and a bipartisan majority in Congress want to see passed. Working with a coalition of public interest groups and immigration policy experts, FAIR built support for making approval of the foreign aid bill contingent on the inclusion of strong border security and immigration enforcement language.
Leading up to a crucial vote in the Senate, FAIR’s Senior Government Relations Manager, Joe Chatham, briefed key congressional staffers about the urgency and the logic of using the foreign aid bill as the legislative vehicle to force President Biden to reassert control of our borders.
Specifically, Joe laid out the stark realities of the Biden Border Crisis:
- More than 8 million border encounters and 1.7 million ‘gotaways’ since January 20, 2021, millions of whom were released into the U.S.
- Record encounters of people on the terror watchlist, at a time of heightened terror threats.
- Record seizures of narcotics, along with untold amounts of lethal fentanyl that successfully entered the country illegally, contributing to more than 100,000 U.S. deaths.
- The Biden administration’s abuse of our asylum system, parole authority, and grants of work authorization to illegal aliens.
During the briefing, Joe warned high-level Republican Senate staffers not to fall for President Biden’s promises to negotiate policy changes after the foreign aid package was approved. Past history indicates that those negotiations would lead nowhere or, at best, result in only cosmetic changes to the Biden administration policies that are driving the border and national security crisis.
In the first real test of their resolve, every Republican member of the Senate voted against proceeding to debate on a bill offered by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. That bill did not include meaningful policy changes to secure our borders. The Motion to Proceed, which required 60 votes to pass, failed 49-51.
The following day, a group of seven GOP senators held a Capitol Hill press conference reiterating their demand for substantive policy changes in the foreign aid package. The seven senators, Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Chuck Grassley (Iowa), John Thune (S.D.), John Cornyn (Texas), Tom Cotton (Ark.), Katie Britt (Ala.) and Thom Tillis (N.C.), emphasized many of the same points that were brought up during FAIR’s briefing. Most encouragingly, Sen. Graham, emphatically rejected the idea of including amnesty provisions to the bill in exchange for reforms to border security and immigration enforcement policies to stop asylum abuse, mass catch-and-release, and unlimited
parole authority.
As of the completion of this edition of the newsletter, the negotiations on the foreign aid bill were still ongoing.