South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham implored his congressional colleagues to help President Donald Trump achieve his top priority of fixing immigration and the southern border.
During a Sunday appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," Graham said the House and Senate, both led by the GOP, must fund Trump's plans to secure the border and deport migrants.
"Here’s the question for the Republican Party. We talk about doing this, but we don’t have the resources. We haven't given the Trump team the resources," Graham told host Kristen Welker.
Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, has said Congress needs to appropriate at least $86 billion to conduct the promised mass deportation of aliens and fix the migrant crisis that ballooned under former President Joe Biden.
Among the needs for Homan are additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and more detention beds.
"This operation is going to be expensive to begin with, but in the long run, there’s going to be huge tax savings for the American taxpayer," Homan said on Fox Business in December.
Graham told Welker, "We need to give Tom Homan the money now to execute the plan that he’s come up with, and without congressional funding, this is going to hit a wall."
The senator said he supports using the reconciliation process, which lets the Senateo pass certain tax and funding bills with a simple majority, to finance Trump's plan.
"So we need to do two bills in reconciliation," Graham said. "The first bill should be $100 billion for the border, $200 billion for national security — put those points on the board. Give Tom the tools he needs to execute a mass deportation strategy."
Although Trump campaigned on deporting all of the roughly 11 million illegal migrants in the U.S., Graham said that would be challenging.
"I'm not so sure they're going to deport 11 million people," said Graham, who added the president also said "they’re going to deport people here that are part of gangs that are criminals."
Homan told CNN's Dana Bash on Tuesday that sanctuary cities releasing illegal immigrants into their communities from jail would mean that ICE would have to find them and may result in "collateral arrests" of more migrants.
"When you release a public safety threat out of a sanctuary jail and they won't give us access to him, that means we got to go to the neighborhood and find him, and we will find him, but when we find him, he may be with others," Homan said. "Others that don't have a criminal conviction and are in the country illegally. They will be arrested too."
Charlie McCarthy ✉
Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
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