Steve Cortes, former senior spokesman and strategist for the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaigns and current head of the League of American Workers, joined Monday’s edition of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy to discuss the Senate’s recently unveiled border deal.
On Sunday, the Senate Appropriations Committee announced the details of the $118.3 billion emergency spending package that would fund U.S. national security efforts in Ukraine, Israel, and at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The majority of the funding – more than $60 billion – would be intended for Ukraine, while more than $14 billion would be directed to Israel, and approximately $20 billion would be spent to enforce policy changes at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Cortes (pictured above) said he was “laughing” at the bill because “if you couldn’t laugh, you’d cry – that’s how terrible it is.”
He specifically zeroed in on one border policy change included in the package, which is the implementation of an expulsion authority to send migrants back to Mexico without an opportunity to claim asylum if the number of illegal border crossings reaches above 5,000 daily for a five-day average.
Cortes noted how U.S. Senator James Lankford (R-OK), one of the negotiators of the bill, formerly insisted that such a policy was “propaganda” and “misinformation.”
“He promised us over and over that it was misinformation, that it was propaganda…Well, once we saw the text last night, it’s true. It’s in black and white,” Cortes said.
Cortes continued by saying the spending package is a “monstrosity on two fronts,”
“Number one, it codifies, regulates, and continues to encourage this mass invasion, this wholesale trespassing bull rush into the United States,” Cortes explained. “But then the other side is, of course, as part of this monstrosity of the bill is that we’re continuing to fund to the tune of overall roughly $100 billion additional to fund overseas wars, primarily in Ukraine to defend their border, the eastern border of Ukraine, which I would argue has no geostrategic significance to the United States. But we’ll guard their border with a mountain of money that we have to borrow – by the way, we don’t have this money – money that we’re going to borrow in the name of the U. S. Taxpayer. But we don’t have that same kind of will to defend our very own border here at home, the front door of the United States.”
Cortes added that when “Biden and Schumer and McConnell agree on something, we can be pretty damn sure that it’s going to be terrible for America.”
“Thankfully, it looks like it’s going to die in the House,” Cortes noted.
Cortes said he hopes the content included in the Senate’s spending package will “motivate the patriots out there that we have to keep the House.”
“I hope this will spur and motivate – as maddening as this bill is and it’s frustrating and in every way irritating as it is – I hope it also motivates people to realize that we have to elect the correct America first candidates in the primaries and of course in the fall,” Cortes added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Steve Cortes” by Steve Cortes.
