During an interview with CBS News on Wednesday, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) reacted to President-Elect Donald Trump expressing openness to a deal on DREAMers by stating that securing the border and deportations need to come first and then “we’ll have a conversation then about what we do. But we need policy reforms, too. If we’re going to have any conversation about this, we need H.R. 2’s core elements to fix asylum, fix parole, fix the unaccompanied children, fix the fact that we have catch and release, and do what we need to do to have policy changes to ensure, in the future, no president can ever abuse our country like Joe Biden did over the last four years.”

Roy said, “Well, President Trump’s well within his rights to talk about ways in which he’s going to try to figure out how to navigate all of this, to do what he said to the American people he would do, which is secure the border of the United States and deal with the absolute disaster that President Biden and his administration left the American people, 5.5 billion people have been dumped into the United States with the abuse and misuse of parole authority and asylum authority, Americans have died…we’ve got to end it. President Trump is looking for the resources, and the House and the Senate ought to grant him those resources to begin removing these people, secure the border of the United States, and then we can have a conversation about what to do going forward.”

He added, “Our job right now is to secure the border, is to manage the fact that we’ve got all of these people that have been released into the United States, including criminals, we have 1.4 million people who have orders of removal. … So, the first thing we’re going to do is secure the border, Tom Homan’s going to do that work, we’re going to remove people, we’ll have a conversation then about what we do. But we need policy reforms, too. If we’re going to have any conversation about this, we need H.R. 2’s core elements to fix asylum, fix parole, fix the unaccompanied children, fix the fact that we have catch and release, and do what we need to do to have policy changes to ensure, in the future, no president can ever abuse our country like Joe Biden did over the last four years.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett