Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, told reporters Tuesday that his panel will unveil changes to the House-passed bill to enact President Trump’s agenda that will be more “conservative” and propose dramatically less money for border security.
Paul has argued for weeks that Congress doesn’t need to spend $150 billion to secure the border and beef up immigration enforcement since border crossings plunged after Trump took office in January.
“It will actually be the conservative version of how much money we spend” on the border, Paul told reporters.
He said the Senate’s text under the jurisdiction of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee would propose about “half as much money” as the $150 billion passed by the House.
“The wall, if you look at the [Customs and Border Protection (CBP)] website — until they removed it yesterday — they said it would cost $6.5 million per mile” to build the border wall, Paul said.
“If you add that up for about 1,000 miles that’s $6.5 billion. They asked for $46.5 billion, so they got a math problem,” he added. “Instead of addressing the math problem, CBP took that off their website two days ago.”
Paul posted on social media Monday that Congress doesn’t need to spend $150 billion to secure the border and enforce immigration law through deportations and other actions, arguing that the Trump administration could get the job done for half the cost.
“We don’t need $150 billion to secure the border. We can do it for half that — $75 billion — and still protect the American people,” he wrote. “The math backs it up.”
Paul said he would submit the text of his revisions to the House-passed Homeland Security chapter of the bill to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) on Tuesday.
“We will be giving that to Sen. Thune later today,” he told reporters.
