South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham urged his fellow lawmakers to support President Donald Trump’s primary focus on reforming immigration and securing the southern border. During a Sunday appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Graham emphasized that both the House and Senate, led by the GOP, must provide funding for Trump’s initiatives to strengthen border security 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. Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, has stated that Congress must allocate at least $86 billion to carry out the promised mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and address the migrant crisis that has worsened under former President Joe Biden.
Homan’s funding requests include hiring additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and expanding the number of 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. During his campaign, Trump said money should be no object when it comes to carrying out deportations.
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 expressed his support for using the reconciliation process, which allows the Senate to 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.” While Trump campaigned on deporting around 11 million illegal migrants in the U.S., Graham noted that this would be a challenging task. “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 stated to CNN’s Dana Bash on Tuesday that when sanctuary cities release illegal immigrants from jail into their communities, it compels ICE to locate them, potentially leading to “collateral arrests” of additional 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.”
