Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said Tuesday that Republicans have to pass funding for the border wall before Democrats take over the majority in the House.
“We’ve got five weeks before Nancy Pelosi takes over as Speaker of the House,” Jordan told “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday morning. “We had better get focused on the things that really matter.”
{mosads}He called “building the border security wall and securing the southern border” one of the most imporant issues in in the spending bills under consideration by Congress.
“We’ve seen what’s happened in the last couple days,” Jordan said, likely referring to a scuffle at the southern border Sunday in which more than 1,000 people reportedly rushed the border wall in large groups, some of them throwing rocks.
“And that was the biggest promise that Republicans made to voters in 2016,” he said of the border wall. “So we had better fight for that.
“We had better put it on the Dec. 7 funding bill because that is again the single biggest issue that the American people elected Republicans to accomplish in 2016, and we’ve got five weeks to get it done.”
President Trump, who has emphasized stopping illegal immigration as an issue since his presidential campaign in 2016, said earlier this month that he would veto any spending bill that did not include border wall funding.
After migrants clashed with U.S. border patrol Sunday, he again called for the wall, tweeting, “We will close the Border permanently if need be. Congress, fund the WALL!”
The chief patrol agent for San Diego Sector Border Patrol, Rodney Scott, discussed structural weaknesses in the current barricades at the southern border that allowed some of the immigrants to push through.
“We’re in the process of building the new border wall here but we don’t have it completed,” he told CNN. “There were some sections that had the dilapidated border wall that was made out of scrap metal the military gave us.
“The group breached a couple sections of that, actually tore down one small section, started to rush across. And that’s another time that they started assaulting our agents.”
Jordan told “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday that the events with the caravan of immigrants only reinforce the importance of funding the border wall.
“The things that have happened over the last few weeks with this caravan, everyone understands that this needs to get done so let’s get it done,” Jordan said.