Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) is calling out legislation promoted by Vice President Kamala Harris on the campaign trail that he says is a “mass amnesty bill” to effectively legalize illegal immigration to the United States.
During a three-hour-long interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Vance detailed the so-called “Senate border security bill” repeatedly championed by Harris, who claimed that it received bipartisan support despite failing to ever gain steam among all Democrats and a swath of Republicans.
“Okay, here was the bill … number one, it sets a maximum cap on the number of illegal immigrants we can have before the border shuts down. That maximum cap is two million illegal aliens a year,” Vance told Rogan:
[The bill] codified what’s called ‘Catch and Release’ where a person comes into our country, an illegal immigrant, but they say ‘Oh no, I’m not an illegal immigrant, I’m an asylum seeker,’ and so their claim for asylum gets adjudicated but because there’s a backlog, because we have so many, their claim isn’t going to be adjudicated for 15 years. So rather than having that person wait in Mexico, we give them a work a permit, we give them legal status, and we let them come into the United States of America. That’s called ‘Catch and Release.’ Donald Trump’s policy was you have to wait in Mexico … [the bill] codified that. [Emphasis added]
In other words, even if Donald Trump became president, this is why he really hated [the bill], is because he would not be able to undo Catch and Release if he won the election, it would codified into American law.
[Emphasis added]Third thing it did: Nothing on the border wall, nothing on the system known as parole which is supposed to be a case-by-case, you grant parole to people who are fleeing tyranny, but Harirs has used parole by the millions of millions — mass parole, whole categories of parole for entire countries.
[Emphasis added]
In effect, Vance said, the bill “wasn’t a border security bill” but actually a “mass amnesty bill” that offered “scraps to Border Patrol” which he said has allowed Harris “to hinge onto that one thing and say it’s a border security bill. No, no, no, it was a mass amnesty bill.”
Vance also noted that several Senate Democrats and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, made up entirely of Democrats, lobbied against the bill.
“By the way, like six Democrats voted against that piece of legislation because they thought it was a disaster,” Vance said:
So, it was not a bipartisan border bill, in fact it was much more bipartisan in opposition to the legislation, but it has allowed Kamala Harris to go around and dishonestly claim that she cares about the southern border even though when they came into office, they bragged about doing all of Donald Trump’s border policies. [Emphasis added]
On Harris’s and President Joe Biden’s watch, the number of migrants encountered at the nation’s borders is approaching 10.5 million — the largest wave ever recorded in U.S. history. Several millions of those migrants have been welcomed to American communities while awaiting their deportation hearings.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at