11 hours ago
Graham overrides Paul's border wall, immigration enforcement proposal
Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has unveiled a plan to override Homeland Security Committee Chair Rand Paul's (R-Ky.) proposal to fund border security and immigration enforcement activities at roughly half the amount favored by Senate and House Republican leaders.
Paul created an uproar two weeks ago when he unveiled his portion of the Trump agenda megabill that would spend $6.5 billion on completing President Trump's border wall and $22.5 billion on expanding detention facilities for migrants.
Now Graham has answered with a move of his own, unveiling a proposal to restore funding for the border wall and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the full amount envisioned by GOP leaders when they passed a blueprint for the bill earlier this year.
'As Budget Chairman, I will do my best to ensure that the President's border security plan is fully funded because I believe it has been fully justified,' Graham said in a statement accompanying the release of his legislative text.
'The president promised to secure our border. His plan fulfills that promise. The Senate must do our part and past his bill,' he said.
Graham would provide Customs and Border Patrol $46.5 billion to build the border wall and related infrastructure such as access roads, cameras, lights and sensors.
Paul, by contrast, provided $6.5 billion for completion of the wall, telling colleagues that's the amount that Customs and Border Patrol estimated on its website the construction would cost.
'The wall, if you look at the [Customs and Border Protection] website — until they removed it yesterday — they said it would cost $6.5 million per mile' to build the border wall, Paul told reporters earlier this month.
'If you add that up for about 1,000 miles that's $6.5 billion. They asked for $46.5 billion so they got a math problem,' he added. 'Instead of addressing the math problem, CBP took that off their website two days ago.'
Graham's 'updated Senate Homeland Security Title' would also provide $45 billion for the detention of aliens ICE has taken into custody.
That's substantially more than the $22.5 billion that Paul's legislative text allocated for expanding detention capacity.
