Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fl.) denied that congressional Republicans killed a bipartisan border deal on orders from Donald Trump, he argued instead that they killed the bill based on uncorroborated reports on social media.
Donalds made the comment in an interview on Newsmax when asked by host Carl Higbie how President Joe Biden might spin the issue of immigration in the upcoming presidential debate.
“He’s gonna say that, ‘oh, the Senate bill was good, but Donald Trump blocked it,’” Donalds said. “That’s a lie. When the elements of the Senate bill were being leaked on X, House Republicans from Speaker Johnson on down, we rejected the bill based upon what we were being– what was being reported on social media.”
Republicans killed the border deal negotiated by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), earlier this year after Trump came out against it because he wanted to use the issue of immigration in November.
Lankford slammed his party at the time for tanking the bill based off of “internet rumors.”
“They’re all functioning off of internet rumors of what’s in the bill, and many of them are false,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “So people want to be able to just see it, read it, go through it, and to be able to see the dramatic change that this really makes and how we handle our immigration system and how we work to be able to secure our border completely.”
