Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) Discusses About Donald Trump's Speech At The Border About Migrants

Interview

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Well, first of all, this invasion rhetoric is just absolutely disgusting. It's xenophobic. It's racist.

Go to Ukraine, you see what an actual invasion looks like. This is somebody who dodged the draft, who has no idea what an actual war looks like. But here's the bottom line, President Trump does not want to fix the border. He does not want to fix the border because all he wants is a chaotic border because he thinks it helps him politically.

We had a deal, a bipartisan compromise, a tough set of new restrictions on the border, including the ability for the President of the United States to close portions of the border when crossings get too high. And Donald Trump instructed his allies in the United States Senate to kill that bill.

And he's been pretty clear why, because he thought it would help Joe Biden, because it would be good for America. So we still have a chance to come together and pass that bipartisan border bill that would help us control the border.

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Donald Trump is the primary thing standing in the way.

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That's right, because this bill included an unprecedented ability for the President to stop processing claims in between the ports of entry when crossings are above 5,000 a day. And they have been above 5,000 a day since the end of last year. Our compromise bill was supported by the pro-Trump Border Patrol Union. It was supported by The Wall Street Journal, the Chamber of Commerce. This was a conservative, tough bill that would have allowed the

president to control the border. And because it actually would have been successful in controlling the border, Republicans led by Donald Trump killed it because they just can't imagine a world in which they can't exploit the border for political purposes.

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Our negotiations took four months and people were impatient to see the product, but it was because we were actually trying to solve the problem. We weren't writing a bill that was just going to score political points. Sen. Lankford and I are very different politically, but we are committed to solving the problem. And one of the problems is that when you come into this country to seek asylum, it often takes 10 years for your claim to be adjudicated.

And so it's an incentive for people to come into the country who have invalid claims because you get 10 years of working in the United States, even if you don't qualify for asylum. So what our bill would have done is not just allow the President to shut down the border, but also expedite the asylum process so that all those claims are heard in six months instead of 10 years. And what that would do is provide a tremendous disincentive to anybody coming to the United States who is going to lose their claim.

So our bill would have fixed a lot of the biggest problems in the immigration system. And again, that's the reason Donald Trump opposes it, because it actually would have worked.

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Well, President Biden, in his first week or so in office, introduced an immigration and border reform bill. And though it didn't get any coverage in the press, he implemented one of the toughest new regulatory regimes at the border in decades, a regime that was opposed by, frankly, many progressive immigration groups.

So it's just actually not true when people say, well, President Biden didn't do anything on the border until this summer. He actually has. What changed is that there are now 10,000 people showing up on a daily basis and so the crisis is bigger. It's more immediate.

And what also changed is that finally, Republicans, we thought, were willing to come to the table and get something done, something they were not willing to do for the first three years of President Biden's term (inaudible) ...

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No, I understand now that Republicans will not support a bipartisan border fix, that they are only interested in this issue remaining a political wedge issue. Like, what would Republican senators do on the weekends if they couldn't fly down to the border, dress up like border patrol officers and pretend that they're chasing down undocumented immigrants? So I don't think at any point, Republicans were going to be ready to get a deal. Donald Trump was never going to let that happen.

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