(NewsNation) — We don’t need new immigration laws. We need the tools to enforce the existing laws. That’s what California Republican Rep. Tom McClintock says Border Patrol agents told him during his visit to Yuma, Arizona.
On “The Hill on Sunday,” the California Republican pushed back on the notion that Congress hasn’t addressed the immigration issue. He said the House passed HR2, the GOP-written immigration bill that the Senate has not considered.
And McClintock said the Senate border bill that some Republicans helped write then voted against was no fix.
“It would make it impossible for any future president to use his existing authorities to secure our border as President Trump did,” McClintock said.
And he added that, in the short term, we don’t need a new law.
“The fact is the president has the full authority to secure our borders. President Trump proved that, and on his very first day in office, Joe Biden reversed all of those policies and began the largest illegal mass migration in history,” he said. In past interviews, McClintock has said that Biden’s executive order is “institutionalizing illegal immigration.”
On the general strife within Congress these days, McClintock said it’s very close to the election of 1928, in which Andrew Jackson beat the incumbent John Quincy Adams in a rematch between the two men.
“Same kind of personalities, same kinds of issues, same breaking apart of old coalitions, same rejection of a governing coalition that had grown very tired of an irrelevant and dismissive of the general population. You can see a lot of those factors playing into the times we’re in right now,” McClintock said.
He also reminded host Chris Stirewalt that, even after that contentious election, the Union survived.
“We got through those times, and we’ll get through these.”