Dems claim Trump killed immigration bill but his success on the border proves he had the right idea: Expert

"President Trump's fast and successful border security proves Biden's false claim of needing the Senate's border insecurity bill was nothing more than Biden's attempted power grab to codify his open border tools and hamstring a future president who wanted to enforce the law," Lora Ries, director of the Heritage Foundation's Border Security and Immigration Center, told Fox News Digital.

"President Trump and Secretary Noem have sent a clear message to illegal aliens: Do not come to our country. You will not be allowed in. And if you get in, we will hunt you down and deport you," a DHS spokesperson said in a release at the time.

That news came just days after Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks told CBS News in an interview that southern border crossings were down 94% from the same period last year, a staggering number he credited to the Trump administration's aggressive crackdown.

"Every day between now and November, the American people are going to know that the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican friends," Biden said in February after the bill failed to pass.

"Frankly, I would have preferred to address this issue through bipartisan legislation, because that's the only way to actually get the kind of system we have now that's broken, fixed. To hire more Border Patrol agents, more asylum officers, more judges. But, Republicans left me no choice," Biden said in June while announcing new executive actions on border security Republicans argued didn't go far enough to alleviate the crisis.

That blame game continued throughout the 2024 campaign, with top Democratic leaders piling on Trump for helping kill the legislation they claimed was vital to ending the crisis.

"When Americans ask this year who is to blame for the continued mess at the border, they should listen to the words that came from Donald Trump himself," Schumer added.

"Donald Trump got word of this bill that would have contributed to securing our border," Harris said during an August interview. 

"He preferred to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem," Harris said during a September debate with Trump. "Because he believed that it would not have helped him politically, he told his folks in Congress, 'Don't put it forward.'"

"He killed the bill, a border security bill that would have put 1,500 more agents on the border," she added.

But Ries argued that not only did Trump's executive actions help alleviate the crisis once he took office, but Democrats had another legislative option all along in border security legislation that had already passed through the Republican-controlled House.