WEST HARRISON – Count Rep. Mike Lawler as a “no” vote if the Senate’s bipartisan plan for immigration reform and border security ever reaches his side of the Capitol.
The Senate was expected to retake the bill this week, reviving a proposal that once seemed likely to bridge one of Washington’s deepest rifts. It sparked an uproar in February after months of bipartisan talks, but then collapsed after former President Donald Trump panned it and Republican senators balked.
Lawler also criticized it in an interview at the Journal News office Tuesday, arguing it would codify a policy he said Republicans don’t support and call “catch and release.” It allows undocumented immigrants to enter and stay in the U.S. while their asylum claims are heard in court, rather than keeping them in detention centers for a process that takes years.
The first-term Republican from Rockland County recently scored high marks for bipartisan work in his first year in Congress. But on this issue, he stood firmly with his party against the Senate bill and in favor of Republicans’ own border bill in the House of Representatives, which has no Democratic support and is shunned by them as overly harsh.
Lawler blamed President Joe Biden and his administration for the underlying problem, saying they had caused a wave of border crossings by reversing Trump’s executive orders.
“That was a policy choice,” he said. “It was a policy choice to introduce ‘catch and release’. So while people focus on the bipartisan Senate bill as if that would somehow solve the fundamental problem, you have to look back at why we’re dealing with this problem in the first place.”
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Threat of Trump’s deportation ‘not realistic’
Lawler sees little prospect for Trump’s threat to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants — using the National Guard or military if necessary — if he defeats Biden in the November election and returns to office.
“That’s not realistic,” he said. “You’re not going to round up 20 million people and kick them out.”
He pointed to the softer approach outlined in a bipartisan bill he helped introduce last year. That proposal, known as the Dignity Act, would create pathways to legalization or citizenship for many of the millions of immigrants already living and working in the U.S. without permission. Deportation, he said, would only be reserved for those who commit crimes.
Trump trials are ‘destructive’ for the country
Lawler has not expressed support during this year’s presidential primaries and has been quieter than many of his colleagues about Trump’s third run for the White House. And he says he has no plans to join a rotating cast of Republicans in the House of Representatives to stand in solidarity with Trump at a Manhattan courthouse where the former president is being tried for falsifying business records to extract hush money payments to cover up a porn star.
But in Tuesday’s interview, Lawler expressed similar doubts about the four criminal cases against Trump, arguing they would widen the partisan divide between the nations and fuel distrust in the criminal justice system among the former president’s supporters.
“I think these types of cases that have been brought are in some ways destructive to the province and will worsen the divide regardless of the outcome,” he said. “And so from that perspective, I think it’s extremely unfortunate for the country.”
Another run on the SALT cap
Lawler was part of a bipartisan effort to increase the $10,000 limit his party set in 2017 for a tax deduction known as SALT — for state and local taxes — that lowered federal tax bills each year for people in high-tax states like New York. . A proposal to double that limit for married couples failed in February when it failed to pass a procedural vote.
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In Tuesday’s interview, Lawler scolded Democrats for opposing that motion, which they did because Republicans combined it with a resolution denouncing the Biden administration’s energy policies. And he said he plans to renew his opposition to the SALT cap next year — if re-elected — when it expires and Congress negotiates a new tax bill.
Chris McKenna covers government and politics for The Journal News and USA Today Network. Reach him at cmckenna@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared in Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Lawler pans border bill, Trump lawsuits: What he said in lohud interview
