Senator Schmitt Statement on Foreign Aid and Border Supplemental Package

WASHINGTON – Today, Senator Eric Schmitt released the following statement after bill text for the foreign aid supplemental and border deal were released last night:

“This bill is a disaster – it loosens current laws and offers an express lane for illegal immigration. It normalizes thousands and thousands of illegal immigrants crossing the border each day and has broad exceptions, sunsets, and loopholes in the very sham ‘shutdown authority’ it gives to Mayorkas and Biden, both of whom have shown they don’t care about fixing the crisis they created. Certain legal challenges to the bill are required to go through the District of Columbia District Court, which would completely eliminate judicial circuits that have historically handled border issues. This bill authorizes non-judicial officers, who are favorable to the Biden Administration’s open borders desires, to decide asylum claims, bypassing the immigration court system and further opening the floodgates and cementing the crisis at our border. If that’s not enough, the lead Democrat negotiator said last night that the ‘border never closes’ under this bill. The border provisions in this supplemental are disastrous, and completely ignore the fact that Joe Biden has every authority he needs to shut down the border right now – he could do it right this very minute, he simply has no interest in addressing the crisis he created. 

Additionally, smashing a bunch of disparate funding packages together and forcing Senators to vote on this massive spending bill with essentially no time to review and debate is completely antithetical to the way that the United States Senate should be run and is wholly unfair to our constituents. This bill was negotiated in secret for months, and now they expect us to vote without real time for debate and review. For these reasons and many other glaring issues with this bill, I’ll be voting no, and I’m sure many of my colleagues will do the same.”