A constant refrain of the Harris-Walz campaign has been to criticize President Donald Trump for derailing the border legislation negotiated by Sens. James Lankford (R., Okla.), Kyrsten Sinema (I., Ariz.), and others late in 2023 and early in 2024. It seems like Vice President Kamala Harris’s only response when asked about her failures on the border and the unprecedented rate of extreme illegal migration on her watch is to point to the Lankford-Sinema bill and to accuse President Donald Trump of undermining a bipartisan effort to solve the problem.
But a lie repeated a thousand times is still a lie. Vice President Harris’s accusation against President Trump is both false and insulting, and as a senior Senate staffer on the Republican side, I would like to set the record straight.
The usual process for dealing with legislation that comes to most senators is not complicated. What happens is that a bill, amendment, or resolution gets referred to the appropriate staffer who deals with that issue in his or her portfolio. The staffer reads and analyzes the legislation with the opinions and interests of his or her boss in mind. The staffer might consult with the drafters of the legislation or other interested parties to get a better understanding of the issue. The staffer then makes recommendations about what position to take and passes that along — either directly to their senator or up the chain of command to a higher level staffer such as a Legislative Director or a Chief of Staff who then decides whether to modify or keep the recommendation before passing it along to the senator.
The senator then chooses whether to follow that recommendation. If the staffer has understood the senator correctly and did a good job understanding and analyzing the issue, the senator will usually follow that recommendation.
That process is what was followed with the Lankford-Sinema Ukraine-border bill. Our offices received the text of the proposed legislation. We analyzed it and made recommendations to our bosses. It turned out that most of us had the same recommendation: that our bosses should oppose this bill. We saw that the bill was a mess that would do little to help secure the border and would do a lot to make the situation worse.
The reasons that Lankford-Sinema would not solve anything are that it imposed no real restrictions or limits on any of the important elements in the chain of illegal migration. It did nothing to address the abuse of the parole authority by the Biden-Harris administration, which is one of the most significant causes of illegal migrants being released into the United States. It did nothing to address the pull factors that incentivize illegal migration such as restricting the authority of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to grant work authorization to those seeking asylum. It did not adequately address the abuse of asylum law that is now being exploited by millions of illegal migrants. It did not require the reinstatement of Remain in Mexico or a similar Trump-era policy that would help to restrain illegal migration.
The reasons that the bill would have made illegal migration worse are that it would have codified and amplified many of the mistakes currently being made by the Biden-Harris administration. It would have removed the requirement that DHS detain persons seeking asylum. It would have allowed United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officers to expedite grants of asylum — leading ultimately to citizenship — in the name of adjudicating cases faster. It would have codified the Biden-Harris administration’s abuse of 8 U.S. Code § 1226 to allow illegal migrants arrested at the border to be released from custody on their own recognizance. It would have provided billions of dollars to state and local governments to provide services to illegal migrants — most of whom would likely have gone to sanctuary cities.
The provision in Lankford-Sinema that would have created authority for the president to expel illegal migrants when encounters reached 4,000 per day and mandated expulsion when encounters reached 5,000 a day was too flawed to be helpful. First, 5,000 encounters per day is far in excess of the historical norm, amounting to more than 1.8 million illegal migrants per year. Second, the mandate is conditional — there would be plenty of ways for a president to avoid enforcing it. Third, expulsion is already within the President’s current authority.
Did Lankford-Sinema do anything good? Sure — it provided much-needed funding to hire additional Border Patrol agents. Ask any Border Patrol agent and they will tell you that they face a recruiting and retention crisis as bad as any federal agency is right now. But they will probably also tell you that the number one challenge they face is not staffing or funding. They will tell you that the number one challenge they face is that the Biden-Harris administration does not allow them to do their jobs.
Most Republican staffers working in the immigration space understood these facts and understood that it was important for our bosses to oppose Lankford-Sinema. We also understood that, even though legislation to help secure the border and enforce immigration law could be helpful, what the United States needs is not comprehensive immigration reform. What the country needs is comprehensive immigration enforcement.
It is important to remember the context in which Lankford-Sinema came to exist. It did not start with the border. It started with Ukraine. In 2022, there was only a trickle of resistance to the provision of resources by Congress to support Ukraine in its resistance against Russian aggression. By mid-2023, that trickle had become a stream. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) was a vocal supporter of continuing to provide aid to Ukraine, but in the face of resistance from a growing number of Republican senators, Sen. McConnell decided to seek out a compromise to satisfy those members while still securing support for Ukraine. The idea was to get agreement on funding Ukraine in exchange for securing the U.S.-Mexico border, which the Biden-Harris administration seemed unwilling to do on its own. Sen. Lankford volunteered to lead the negotiations.
The idea for a compromise was a reasonable one, but there was a fundamental problem that Sen. McConnell overlooked: of all the senators and staffers who were negotiating the deal, none of them opposed funding for Ukraine.
That might not seem important, but the most important tool that anyone needs to have in a negotiation is leverage. What was the leverage for the Republican negotiators to force the Democratic negotiators closer to our position on the border? What was the threat? Sen. McConnell wanted Ukraine funding just as much as Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) did.
In other words, the Republicans were never going to walk away from a deal, and the Democrats knew that. Without the threat of walking away, the Republican side had no ability to achieve a reasonable compromise. The only way for the negotiation to have worked properly — forcing Democrats to move closer to the Republican position on the border in exchange for Ukraine funding — would have been to appoint a senator on the Republican side to be involved in the negotiations who was opposed to, or was at least skeptical about, funding Ukraine.
That did not happen. And so we ended up with a bad deal: a deal that did not secure the border and a deal that would have given billions of dollars to sanctuary cities and codified many of the errors of the Biden-Harris administration. Mistakes happen, even by the most talented of political strategists, which Sen. McConnell certainly is. We can move on from that.
Republican senators did the right thing in stopping that deal, but they did so on their own judgment at the recommendation of the staffers they hired to do that job. President Donald Trump was also right to oppose Lankford-Sinema, but giving him the credit or the blame for scuttling the deal is an insult, not only to the senators who made the right decision on its own merits, but also to the staffers who did the jobs we were hired to do. For this reason, I respectfully request that the Harris-Walz campaign stop stealing our valor.
The author of this op-ed is a Senior Senate Judiciary counsel.