White House preps for border battle

The Biden administration is ramping up attacks against Republicans ahead of a possible government shutdown, arguing that the GOP is imperiling a funding deal and border security policy with increasingly unreasonable demands.

The messaging effort represents a concerted effort by the White House to turn the tide of a long-running clash over an issue that has challenged Democrats. As Biden turns to his reelection after three years in the White House, migration at the southern border remains a major vulnerability for him and a constant attack line for Donald Trump and other Republicans.

With that issue now at the center of government funding and foreign aid negotiations, administration aides are facing the possibility that those negotiations will falter. If that happens, they want to turn it to their political advantage.

The fresh counteroffensive by the White House has included launching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whom House Republicans are trying to impeach, on a television interview spree. In recent days, Mayorkas has pushed back on criticism about Biden’s handling of the border and even decamped to conservative-leaning Fox News to make his case.

Beyond Mayorkas, Biden aides have begun publicly blasting House Republicans as hypocritical, while the president himself chastised the GOP for denying him the funding needed to protect the border in his first remarks to reporters this year.

“It is a shift,” said Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist. “I think [the White House] always had this in their back pocket should the need arise. And the need has arisen.”

It remains to be seen whether the White House and the Biden campaign or the president himself will sustain this line of argument; in the past, the president and his allies have struggled to maintain a consistent drumbeat of criticism against the GOP on policy in a chaotic political environment.

Still, Biden administration officials believe they’ve been handed fodder in recent days with several conservative House GOPers — including Texas Republican Rep. Keith Self — tying border closure to a government funding standoff that is quickly coming into focus. Another Texas Republican, Rep. Troy Nehls, suggested he wouldn’t vote for any border deal that might boost Biden’s political standing ahead of November.

All of this has taken place amid ongoing talks between the White House, Mayorkas and Senate negotiators over border policy changes that could unlock the president’s request for aid to Ukraine and Israel. The aggressive posturing comes as the deal remains elusive, with a person familiar with the talks saying there had not been new breakthroughs in recent days.

It also is coming as House Republican leadership visited the southern border this week to place a spotlight back on migration numbers there. The White House effort to cast those lawmakers as more interested in photo ops than policy solutions is a long-shot attempt heading into an election year to shift the voters’ blame for the border crisis from Biden to Republicans before November.

It’s one that Republican leaders say won’t work.

Speaker Mike Johnson’s office on Friday issued a detailed memo disputing the administration’s claims, in particular arguing that House Republicans have never voted to cut thousands of agents.

“From the start of President Biden’s term, his Administration has implemented policies that have undermined security and created a humanitarian crisis at the Southern border,” wrote Johnson spokesperson Raj Shah. “Now, in a desperate attempt to shift blame for a crisis their policies have induced, they have argued it’s a funding problem. Clearly, they have no facts to back up their claim.”

White House officials seemed eager to get into the fray.

“Today’s memo proves we struck a nerve by highlighting House Republicans’ actions to eliminate 2,000 Border Patrol agents and weaken our crackdown on fentanyl,” White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates fired back, pointing to a 2023 debt limit bill.

So far, little public polling suggests that the president’s team should feel confident that they can turn the tides of this particular debate. The numbers continue to show Biden getting poor marks on handling the historic levels of migration to the southern border. But White House officials argue last year’s House vote on the GOP’s debt limit bill helps illuminate the larger point they’re making.

It is not an argument that the White House has delivered with vigor or consistency in the months since House Republicans voted for that proposal en masse. They are dialing up the message now, however belatedly.

“We’ve already lost count of how many are now outright calling for a government shutdown that would damage the nation’s economy and national security,” Bates said. “The through line of their record is that they keep putting extreme politics above the needs of the American people — whether it’s threatening government shutdowns that would cost jobs or delaying border security funds that are critical for our national security.”

Cardona said the Biden administration has offered “some very reasonable policies and requests that would frankly meet what Republicans want if Republicans were serious — $14 billion in additional border security that would go to new border patrol, asylum processors, immigration judges and smart border security.”

She added: “And frankly, a lot of money to try to detect fentanyl coming through the border.”

The increasingly aggressive posture of Biden aides comes as the border threatens to suck up a lot of oxygen in the presidential race and in any legislative battle on Capitol Hill in the coming months. Republicans are laying the groundwork to impeach Mayorkas over his handling of the crisis, even as he plays a key role in border policy negotiations in the Senate.

The government funding fight further complicates matters. Johnson has not embraced the idea of tying border closure to government funding. But he has said that HR 2 — the House GOP bill panned by Senate Republicans as dead on arrival in their chamber — must be part of a national security supplemental or government funding bill.

The surge of migrants at the border is an “an unmitigated disaster. A catastrophe … of the president’s own design,” Johnson said Wednesday alongside dozens of House Republicans during a visit to a border crossing in Eagle Pass, Texas.

Celinda Lake, a 2020 Biden campaign pollster and the president of Lake Research Partners, argued that there is an opportunity for Biden to convince voters he’s a problem-solver who is seeking “common-sense solutions” on immigration, especially if Republicans overplay their hand.

She conducted recent polling for the American Business Immigration Coalition and other groups and found that Americans see the current immigration system as “broken.”

Voters, she added, respond most positively to solutions — working with Mexico and allies, changing current immigration laws, offering a path to citizenship for DACA recipients and dreamers, and granting work permits for migrant farm workers to address shortages, among other policies. Many voters they surveyed also broadly reject the linking of immigration policy changes to foreign aid because they view it as a political tactic that ultimately won’t result in progress.

“This notion of shut down the government, shut down the border, wildly unpopular,” Lake said. “So I think that, ironically, the Republicans, in an attempt to dramatize this to their base, are turning this into an issue that has more legitimacy to an issue that just seems like a political stunt.”