Marco Rubio Schools Jake Tapper on Asylum Highway in Border Bill

WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 29: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) speaks at the Heritage Foundation March 29, 2022
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Neil Munro

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) shot down, stomped on, and trashed CNN’s Jake Tapper’s scripted effort Sunday to defend the failed border bill drafted by GOP leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Democrats claim McConnell’s bill tightened the asylum rules but the bill actually created a fast-track asylum highway to citizenship, Rubio told Tapper on the State of the Union talkshow on CNN.

“Asylum is a pathway to citizenship,” he said as he shredded Tapper’s pro-migration talking points.

“Look, there are some things in that bill that we should do, [such] change the asylum standard,” Rubio told Tapper. But, Rubio added:

The bill basically creates an asylum corps, OK? … Thousands of bureaucrats [4,300 Asylum Officers], basically agents, asylum agents, that would be empowered right at the border to either allow people into the country with an immediate work permit. Today, [migrants have] to wait six months. [If] you give them an immediate work permit, you’re going to have more people coming. That’s a huge magnet.

Or the [4,300 Asylum Officers have the] power to immediately release them and grant them asylum, which now puts them on a five-year path to citizenship, which is what a lot of Democrats want. They want to turn a bunch of illegal immigrants into voters, into citizens, into voters, in the hopes that those people will then turn around and vote for them in future elections, grateful because they will know who let them in.

Tapper looked surprised as Rubio explained the asylum highway, likely because his media peers have ignored the bill’s texts and instead played up the Democratic Party’s talking points.

For example, Tapper rushed to reassure viewers that “This [bill] doesn’t provide a path to citizenship for any of these people, just to clarify.” But Rubio continued the lesson:

Yes, it does. Absolutely, it does … Yes, it does. When you have asylum, you are on a path to citizenship. When you get asylum, you are a year away from a green card and four years away from citizenship. Absolutely, it does.

Democratic Senators really wanted the asylum highway to citizenship — but lost when the GOP Senators revolted against McConnell’s giveaway. “The reforms to the asylum process that move adjudications from 10 years down to six months is a really important reform,” said the Democrats’ negotiator, Sen. Chris Murphy (R-CT). He added:

It’s really thoughtful. It’s really well done … the basic idea of that reform is an important step forward.

Murphy then promised Democrats would change the Senate’s rules to create the asylum highway. “We’ll change the rules … What I’m talking about is a Senate in which there’s a 50-vote threshold for passage.”

Surprised by Rubio’s clear answer, Tapper answered with a list of Democratic talking points:

Senator [James] Lankford [R-OK] calls it by far the most conservative border security bill in four decades. That includes, of course, the 2013 compromise that you negotiated as part of the Gang of Eight. This bill would have allowed the administration to temporarily shut down the border. It included funding for the border wall. It would have made it much more difficult to claim asylum. It added detention beds … And it has none of the Democratic priorities that were included in your 2013 compromise, such as a path to citizenship. Why isn’t that a win for Republicans?

But Rubio learned from the 2013 disaster, which he got pulled into by party leaders when he was in his third year as a Senator. He exited the elite-backed amnesty push in 2014 — and later wrote what he learned in a book, titled “Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America’s Inheritance of Liberty, Security, and Prosperity.”

So Rubio then explained the shutdown hoax to Tapper:

First of all, it doesn’t shut down the border. It creates the ability to shut down the border, but it also gives the president the ability to say, “We’re not going to do it — the emergency is suspended because it’s not in our national interest to do this.” By the way, you still have to process, I believe, 1,400 illegal immigrants a day even in one of these emergencies. And it goes away in three years.

The other thing it does is, it doesn’t touch the parole program, which is one of the loopholes the president has used to release all these people into this country.

Rubio then dragged an unhappy Tapper back to the asylum highway in McConnell’s border bill, saying:

You talk about the asylum, about the judges, the immigration judges. Here’s the difference …  this asylum court they’re going to create, they can’t even be overturned by the attorney general.

These people would have the power right at the border to grant people asylum. And a lot of people don’t talk about that, but it’s right there in the [McConnell draft] law. It does that.

Yes, it’s good to change the [asylum] standard, but it’s … ultimately going to be applied by an administration that has proven its unwillingness to enforce our immigration laws.

…

Now, in the hands of another administration, perhaps that [higher] asylum standard could be applied differently. But, ultimately, once you have this asylum corps hired by [pro-migration border chief Alejandro] Mayorkas, hired by Biden, put at the border … they will have the power [to grant asylum] … And that is a pathway to citizenship.

“Asylum is a pathway to citizenship,” Rubio firmly told a flustered Tapper.

“I want to turn to another topic because we’re running out of time,” Tapper replied.

Multiple GOP Senators agree with Rubio.

Watch the massacre here:

 

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