House Speaker John Boehner’s forthcoming $1 trillion-plus omnibus spending deal–the text of which he still hasn’t released–will reportedly surrender every gain Republicans made this summer on the border crisis.
The deal, which Boehner is working with Nancy Pelosi and her top lieutenant Steny Hoyer to secure Democratic votes for, would–according to the New York Times–“allocate roughly $948 million to handle the surge of unaccompanied minor children who began pouring across the southern border this summer.”
Under the spending deal, there would almost certainly be no policy changes attached to that $948 million worth of cash for Obama’s border crisis.
Nearly every House Republican, in the days leading up to the August recess, rejected spending $659 million on the border crisis unless there were changes to immigration law–forcing GOP leadership to keep Congress in town an extra day and hash out the details to do so. But, now under Boehner’s leadership, every House Republican who votes for the omnibus bill will not only be flip-flopping from the previous position that no money could be allocated to Obama’s border crisis without policy changes–they’ll be giving him more money than they said was unacceptable last time.
In a statement after the House passed the key policy changes in the summer, Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA)–one of the key conservatives involved in securing the changes–issued a statement detailing how important those policy changes that Boehner is apparently abandoning now were.
“The legislation funds the efforts, in part, by redirecting foreign aid for El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to be used instead in repatriation efforts,” Barletta said:
It also deploys the National Guard for border protection and reimburses states for their use of the Guard on the southern border. The legislation will also prevent people detained at the border from being relocated around the United States by holding them pending deportation proceedings at the border. The House passed its legislation while members of the Senate had already left town without approving any measures to deal with the situation.
Barletta went on to detail how these “very important improvements” and policy changes will help “in how we approach this current crisis and prevent similar situations in the future.”
“We are paying for states to send the National Guard to the border to help,” Barletta said:
We are changing the law so that all illegal immigrants are treated the same no matter where they are from. We are taking foreign aid we were giving to countries that contributed to this problem, and using it to repatriate their citizens instead. And we are halting President Obama’s DACA program that actively encouraged the illegal immigrants in the first place. Importantly, we are also stopping the practice of sending unaccompanied minors to relocation centers around the country by keeping them at the border pending their deportation proceedings.
A senior congressional GOP aide told Breitbart News on Tuesday that the only thing that has changed between this summer’s fights and now–when Boehner is leading Republicans into a flip-flop and surrender–is that Republicans decisively won an election.
“So, over the summer, GOP firmly says to Obama: no long-term funding period and no money until we change the policy to try and force deportations,” the aide said:
Members spent a lot of time trying to write that bill. The only thing that’s happened since then is we won an election. So can someone explain to me why we are giving Obama more money, for longer-term, without the policy change? Why not wait until January so we can pass a bill with the policy changes? Basically, the [House Appropriations Committee Chair Rep. Hal] Rogers plan looks like it will subsidize illegal immigration through September of next year. None of the border kids are being sent home, and ‘border security’ is just being used to funnel the illegal immigrants from south of the border into the interior of the U.S.