Back in February, the Senate voted down a supposedly “bipartisan” and “compromise” border bill co-sponsored by Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz. Though in 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris told Chuck Todd of Meet the Press “the border is secure,” she has promised to support this bill’s return in Congress. As the Senate deal may be back in play, it’s worth remembering why it failed to pass the last time.

The mainstream media party line on the Senate border deal is that everyone—Democrats, the White House, and many Republicans—was on board with the deal until former President Donald Trump made a few phone calls and killed it, so he could use the border crisis as an election issue.

In fact, very few Republicans ever supported it, for good reason. Members of Congress with any knowledge of immigration issues swiftly reached the conclusion that the bill not only didn’t secure the border, it also cemented into law several Jerry-rigged fudges that President Joe Biden was using to bring in inadmissible aliens by the boatload. Seeing it would do much more harm than good, they voted it down overwhelmingly.

Lankford is not from a border state, nor is he known as an immigration expert. He seems to have been outwitted by his negotiating partners in the drafting process, ending up with a bill that codified, rather than addressed, the present border chaos. After the bill was defeated once, he and Sinema voted to block putting it to a second full Senate vote a few months later.  

Listing all the Senate bill’s faults would take too long—here’s a full report if you want details.  

In brief, the Senate deal would have locked into law the “catch and release” of a staggering 5,000 illegal aliens caught entering the U.S. per day—that’s 1.8 million every year.

It granted the administration discretion to suspend even those crazily high limits, waived whole categories of illegal immigrants—like unaccompanied minors—from the count, and constrained how long the limits could be applied.

It gave many illegal border-crossers work permits and government-paid immigration lawyers to fight deportation. The Senate deal would have continued to authorize the use billions of taxpayer dollars to incentivize mass illegal migration on a biblical scale, by funding the immigration-industrial complex of charities, activist groups, and nonprofits that feed from the trough of mass illegal migration.

Furthermore, the bill wouldn’t cap or stop abuses of immigration parole, which would give any open borders-promoting future president an unlimited bypass of numerical limits.

The CHNV (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela) parole program alone has brought in half a million inadmissible aliens since 2021. Every day, by the thousands, the Department of Homeland Security is giving inadmissible aliens from these four countries parole or releasing them at the border into deportation proceedings that will allow them to remain here indefinitely. We’re talking about three socialist dictatorships and one failed state here—none of them share criminal records with us. That means we are letting in untold numbers of people who are threats to our citizens, though we don’t know which ones.

Then they’ve let in another 800,000 inadmissible aliens—and counting—from all over the world, using the CBP One mobile app boondoggle that allows ineligible aliens to schedule an appointment to come into the United States at a port of entry rather than crossing illegally at other points along the border.

In contrast, House Resolution 2, the border security bill which passed the House in May 2023, was a serious piece of legislation that would have ended parole abuse through bogus programs, ended mass release, and returned to keeping asylum claimants outside the country until their asylum cases were approved.

This program, known as the Migrant Protection Protocols or informally as “Remain in Mexico,” sent a clear signal that while they could apply for asylum in the U.S., aliens would not gain the benefit of coming into the country before being approved. This discouraged fraudulent asylum claims, which have completely clogged the system by the millions and will take many years to clear out.

By ending the Migrant Protection Protocols, resuming catch-and-release, and creating dubious new parole programs, the Biden administration allowed millions of inadmissible aliens, many of them young men from high-crime countries, to enter the United States.

The Senate deal was an attempt by a few Republicans to reach out to Democrats and pass something akin to HR 2, even if there had to be some concessions. But the “compromise” final result was the very opposite of border security.

The Senate deal was the failed result of a gamble—that there was enough bipartisan support to pass serious legislation without watering it down so much that it would be worse than doing nothing. In poker terms, it was a “busted flush,” where you don’t draw the cards you need to complete a winning hand.

A busted flush is worthless. So is the so-called bipartisan border deal, which should never see the light of day in the Senate again. Congress needs to go back to the drawing board.