Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) slammed the bipartisan border deal unveiled by Senate negotiators Sunday night as “garbage.”
“I am absolutely shocked that anyone is even considering this garbage package. And as you mentioned, Biden is going to be putting more pressure on the Senate and the House. Really going to the American people trying to sell this knockoff of a border deal,” Cammack said Monday on Fox News.
“It’s like they were trying to sell us on Gucci, but really, it’s the package that the guy around the corner in the alley pulled out of his trunk,” she continued.
The proposed deal includes measures to raise standards for asylum screenings and to process claims faster, closes loopholes that allow for parole or “catch and release” and provides new authority to close the border after a certain number of crossings there.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and House GOP leadership have already announced their opposition to the proposed bill, saying that it is “dead on arrival” in the House. Hard-line conservatives and allies of former President Trump also swiftly criticized the content of the bill on Sunday, setting up a likely uphill battle in Congress.
Cammack argued that the deal “is not a border security package” in her interview with Fox News’s Harris Faulkner. She said the border must be a “priority” in the bill for her to consider backing it.
“You are not securing the border in this package, and we would do well not to lie to the American people and try to sell them on that. They already are pissed. We need to make sure that they understand that this is not a border security package because they know that it’s not,” Cammack said.
The $118 billion national security supplemental also includes $60 billion for Ukraine, $14.1 billion for Israel and aid for Indo-Pacific allies in addition to the bipartisan border agreement.
President Biden praised the bipartisan deal in a statement Sunday and urged Congress to approve the bill so he could sign it.
“Now we’ve reached an agreement on a bipartisan national security deal that includes the toughest and fairest set of border reforms in decades. I strongly support it,” Biden wrote in a statement.