WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Appropriations and Foreign Relations Committees and former U.S. Ambassador to Japan, yesterday joined The Ingraham Angle on Fox News to discuss his opposition to the border supplemental deal after text of the legislation was made public Sunday night.
Partial Transcript
Hagerty on his opposition to the border bill: “I think clearly our conference is divided right now. I’m glad to hear the Speaker of the House be as clear as he was with you just a few minutes ago. I think we’re going to have to continue to talk this through and work together, but I can tell you where I am: I’m a hard no on this bill […] It’s not a border bill. Just because you call it a border bill doesn’t make it a border security bill. And you’ve got these Orwellian phrases in it like ‘non-custodial detention;’ I’m sure all kids at school would like to have non-custodial detention. It’s another one of these bills that’s just put in place so they can, again, as you said, use this as a means to hurt President [Donald] Trump, what he’s tried to accomplish. If you go back to Section 212(f), that’s something that President Trump had intended to really use to shut the border down. By making 4,000, 5,000 people moving into the country every day a new threshold, you’re undercutting all of that. That’s not where we need to be.”
Hagerty on the need to address Democrats’ incentives to encourage illegal immigration: “We need a frank discussion about what the incentive is here, and I think you know what it is, Laura. They’re going to continue to do this because we know how congressional seats and electoral votes are allocated. They’re allocated based on the number of people in a given state—not the number of citizens—the number of people. You talked about where the free credit cards are, where the free access to healthcare is [in] New York, California. The more illegals that go there, the more political power they get because they get more congressional districts, and they get more electoral votes as a result. That’s the incentive; we’ve got to address that too.”
###