McConnell: Border crisis is top issue in 2024, Biden made ‘major mistake’

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) told The Hill in an interview that he sees the failure of the Biden administration to curb the flow of migrants across the southern border as a “huge issue,” and he thinks it will take center stage in the presidential campaign.

McConnell declined to comment on Republicans losing the special election for New York’s 3rd Congressional District, which GOP pollster Frank Luntz called the “final wakeup call” for the House GOP, but said the race showed that border security will be a powerful issue in this year’s election.

“I’m not going to criticize the House. I do think in terms of the border, it is a huge issue. I think President Biden really mishandled this from the very beginning and I think in his race it’s going to be huge,” McConnell predicted during a conversation in his Capitol office.

In Senate and House races, the GOP leader sees candidates in both parties scrambling to position themselves as ready to solve the crisis. And he acknowledged that Democrats will try to use the defeat of a bipartisan border security deal at the hands of Republicans to their advantage.

“In these Senate and House races, my guess is both sides are going to argue about who’s the most in favor of securing the border. I think that’s what happened in New York,” he said.

“But in the presidential race I think it’s pretty clear the president made a major, major mistake,” he said. “And I think it will be a big issue in his race.”

Former Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) won Tuesday’s race for the seat vacated by former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) in part by hammering his opponent, Mazi Pilip, over Republicans sinking a bipartisan deal that would have spent $20 billion to secure the border.

After Senate Republicans torpedoed a deal negotiated by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) with Senate Democrats and the White House, Democrats tried to flip the script in the New York race by running more ads focused on immigration than Republicans did in the final 10 days of the campaign.  

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told The New York Times Wednesday that Democrats can play offense on the issue because Senate Republicans blocked the bipartisan border deal, which would have reformed the nation’s asylum laws and given Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas emergency power to close the border.

“We have now made the border issue where Democrats are on their front foot, whereas before all this happened, we were on our back foot,” he said.

But McConnell thinks it won’t help Biden in the biggest race in the country.

The number of migrants crossing the southern border has skyrocketed during the Biden administration.

Border officials paroled 803,000 migrants into the country in 2023 and 796,000 migrants in 2022. U.S. immigration officials processed more than 300,000 migrants in December alone.

By contrast, the Trump and Obama administrations paroled an average of 5,600 people into the country a year.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Jan. 31 showed that Biden’s approval rate has sunk to 38 percent — 2 percentage points lower than where it stood in December — and revealed that Americans are increasingly concerned about immigration.

Seventeen percent of respondents said they saw immigration as the most important problem facing the country, compared to 11 percent who said so in December.

McConnell acknowledged that Senate Republicans were deeply divided over Lankford’s border deal, which he called a “huge success by any objective standard,” noting it received endorsements from the National Border Patrol Council, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

But he said Senate Republican challengers will have the ability to position themselves however they want on the issue.

“Whether you do or you don’t support the supplemental, how you feel about the border, these non-incumbents have the freedom to take whatever position they think works for them,” he said.