House speaker to press White House for border solution before $61.4B Ukraine funding

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Wednesday he will tell President Biden to secure the US-Mexico border before considering sending $61.4 billion in additional military aid to Ukraine for its war against Russia when the leaders meet at the White House.

“Before we even talk about Ukraine, I am going to tell the president what I am telling all of you and we’ve told the American people: border, border, border,” Johnson, 51, told reporters on Capitol Hill.

“We have to secure our own border before we talk about doing anything else. And that’s the message I’ve had since day one,” Johnson added, saying the Biden administration had ignored his questions about assistance for Ukraine.

“What is the endgame and the strategy in Ukraine? How will we have accountability for the funds?” he asked. “We need to know that Ukraine would not be another Afghanistan.”

Johnson, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will huddle in the Oval Office to discuss the president’s requested $106 billion national security package for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and US border security.

The proposal includes $61.4 billion for Kyiv’s war effort, $14.3 billion for military assistance to Israel for its fight against Hamas terrorists in Gaza and $13.6 billion to enhance border enforcement.

In a Senate floor speech Wednesday morning, McConnell also hit Biden, 81, over the “urgent crisis” on the southern border, saying “negotiators are making headway toward the most significant border enhancements in almost 30 years.”

At the same time, Johnson is catching flak from the right flank of his caucus over a $1.66 trillion topline federal spending agreement he reached earlier this month with Schumer, raising fears that hardline members would force a partial government shutdown beginning Friday night.

Over the weekend, the House speaker knocked a leaked draft of the supplemental bill produced by a conservative immigration-focused group that showed a patchwork of solutions to the record-breaking migrant crisis on the southern border.

Those provisions included an increase in green card handouts to 50,000 per year and a threshold for daily migrant expulsions of 5,000 if crossings exceed that number over a seven-day period.

The chief Republican negotiator on the bill, Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, cautioned the press and fellow lawmakers “not to believe everything you read on the internet” following the leak.

“We don’t know exactly what the Senate has come up with because we’ve not seen the text,” Johnson said Wednesday morning, adding that House Republicans will not consider “comprehensive immigration reform” with Democrats controlling both the White House and Senate.

“You can’t do that quickly,” he told reporters, saying his conference was “standing” firm in support of their border security bill from last year, known as H.R. 2.

Schumer blasted a Senate companion version of the legislation pitched by Republicans last November for “making Ukraine funding conditional on the hard-right border policies that can’t ever pass Congress.”

“H.R. 2 had very important elements: restore Remain in Mexico policy; end catch and release; reform the asylum program, the broken parole process; rebuild the wall,” Johnson responded in his press conference. “You can’t choose from among those on a menu and assume you’re going to solve the problem.”

“We talked to the deputy chief of US Border Patrol, who’s a 33-year veteran of the agency,” he said of his recent trip with 64 House GOP lawmakers to Eagle Pass, Texas, the center of the migrant crisis on the southern border.

The deputy chief, he said, informed them that Border Patrol was “administering an open fire hydrant” with “more buckets,” rather than working “to reduce the flow.”

“No one should be playing politics with this. There’s too much at stake. Fentanyl is the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18-49,” Johnson added. “The cartels on the border down there are making billions of dollars trafficking humans into the US. … The human catastrophe cannot be overstated.”