May 20 (UPI) -- The Senate this week is getting ready to vote again on a bipartisan border security bill, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said.
"It's been 103 days since Donald Trump and the Republicans blocked the strongest, most comprehensive border security bill in a generation," Schumer, D-N.Y., said Monday morning on X.
"And they still don't have any plan except exploiting the border for Trump's political gain," he added.
Schumer announced on Sunday the Senate "is prepared to take up the bipartisan Border Act this week," which he called "a tough, serious, bipartisan proposal to secure our border."
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The bipartisan bill, negotiated as a part of the larger National Security Supplemental, was designed by Sens. James Lankford, R-Okla., Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., and originally had a Republican majority support until former President Donald Trump urged lawmakers to oppose the bill after relaying his feeling that it would give President Joe Biden a political win during a presidential election.
"Trump had urged the GOP to kill this bill -- saying 'blame it on me,'" said Schumer in a letter to his Senate colleagues urging them to vote for the bill which will be presented as a standalone measure.
Schumer noted Senate negotiators earlier this year "achieved the unthinkable: bipartisan agreement on a comprehensive border security package."
"The former President made clear he would rather preserve the issue for his campaign than solve the issue in a bipartisan fashion," Schumer wrote.
"On cue, many of our Republican colleagues abruptly reversed course on their prior support, announcing their new-found opposition to the bipartisan proposal," the letter said.
Also on Monday, the White House again called on Congress "to fix our broken immigration system."
In a statement, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the bipartisan border legislation "would deliver the significant policy changes, resources, and personnel needed to secure our border and make our country safer," adding it adds "thousand"s of additional Border Patrol Agents as well as Customs and Border Protection personnel and other immigration staff, invests in technology to catch drug traffickers and establishes a "temporary emergency authority to shut down the border when the system is overwhelmed; and expand access to lawful immigration pathways while expediting access to work authorization for those eligible."
"We strongly support this legislation and call on every Senator to put partisan politics aside and vote to secure the border," Jean-Pierre wrote Monday.
But the House Republican leadership in a joint statement Monday by House Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La.., Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., and U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y. were critical of congressional Democrats who they claimed "have stood by while the Biden Administration has opened our borders to criminal drug cartels, terrorists, and untold millions of illegal immigrants."
The letter claimed Schumer is trying to prop up vulnerable senators up for re-election by setting up a vote "which has already failed once in the Senate because it would actually codify many of the disastrous Biden open border policies that created this crisis in the first place."
However, House Republican leaders said should the border bill get to the House side for a vote, "the bill would be dead on arrival."
