The central reality of U.S. immigration politics is that Republicans are deliberately blocking bipartisan efforts to tighten border security for the explicit reason that passing such legislation would hurt Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. If journalists want their audiences to understand the issue as the 2024 election approaches, they should place that fact front and center in their reports.

Migrant flows have increased since President Joe Biden took office, with apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border reaching record levels. Many of the migrants are fleeing political and economic instability in Central and South America, and hundreds of thousands have made asylum claims to authorities at the border. 

It’s impossible to overstate the right’s apocalyptic rhetoric in response to the migration increases. While Fox News runs endless segments on “Biden’s Border Crisis,” prominent influencers are calling for a civil war and urging their supporters to stockpile guns to protect their families from the “invasion.” Republicans and their right-wing propagandists claim that this increase is a deliberate aim of Biden’s administration, citing the white nationalist conspiracy theory that Democrats seek to replace white Americans with brown immigrants who will vote to keep them in power.

But Biden isn’t the one blocking border security efforts for political gain — Republicans are. Trump wants to run for president on his ability to stop chaos at the border, and that message only works if his congressional allies ensure that the border remains chaotic. Speculating that this is the GOP strategy would sound like a conspiracy theory if Republicans weren’t openly admitting that that is what they are doing.

The Biden administration doesn’t lack the willpower to “secure” the border, as David J. Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute noted. “The reason people are being released is because of operational capacity to detain and deport them, not policy.” Biden’s administration “removed a higher percentage of border crossers in his first two years than Trump did during his last two years, (51 percent versus 47 percent), despite Trump having to deal with many fewer total crossings,” in part by making deportation agreements with the governments of Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela, according to Bier — but many more migrants are trying to cross into the United States without sufficient legal avenues to do so.

Biden is seeking additional resources from Congress to build the operational capacity needed to secure the border. He asked Congress in October for $13.6 billion to “pay for more border patrol officers, immigration judges, shelters and detention centers” as part of a broader supplemental funding request that included military aid to Ukraine and Israel. But Republicans refused to take up the legislation in the House and blocked it in the Senate, demanding border policy changes as their price for supporting the funds. 

Biden then supported ongoing bipartisan Senate negotiations over potential immigration policy changes, which reportedly neared a final deal earlier this week. His willingness to accept a deal has drawn fire from the left, as advocates and some congressional Democrats criticize the proposal for dropping progressive priorities like a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who have lived in the country for decades while making major concessions on Republican demands like limiting the president’s ability to offer parole to people fleeing humanitarian crises.

You would think, given the cataclysmic terms in which Republicans and right-wing media talk about the border, that they would be eager to pass legislation intended to tighten its security. But you’d be wrong — Trump and Republican leaders in Congress are all trying to scuttle any potential deal because Trump wants chaos at the border so he can run on his purported ability to stop it.

Trump spoke out against any deal that isn’t “PERFECT” in a post last week on Truth Social. “I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions & Millions of people, many from parts unknown, into our once great, but soon to be great again, Country!”

Embattled House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) likewise says he opposes bipartisan border legislation that doesn’t include everything House Republicans want. Last week, he told Fox’s Laura Ingraham that he’s been speaking “pretty frequently” with Trump about the possible deal. He offered the admission after Ingraham said that she had just spoken to Trump, who told her “he had spoken to you about this deal and that he is against it, and he urged you to be against this deal.” She added that the former president was “extremely adamant about that.” 

Trump has also been reaching out to Republican senators in an effort to get them to “kill” the deal, HuffPost reported Wednesday. “Trump wants them to kill it because he doesn’t want Biden to have a victory,” HuffPost’s source told them. “He told them he will fix the border when he is president… He said he only wants the perfect deal.”

Trump’s effort appears to have succeeded, according to statements Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) reportedly made to Senate Republicans at a Wednesday meeting. PunchBowl News reported:

In other words: Improving the situation on the border would give Biden “a victory” and “undermine” Trump’s election campaign, so Republicans aren’t going to do it.

GOP politicians are all using stunts to generate attention from their right-wing media allies and increase the salience of border chaos as an electoral issue. They will bus migrants to New York City and fly them to Martha's Vineyard, trek down to the border to give press conferences, and even encourage standoffs with federal law enforcement. Donald Trump will spend the next 10 months using demagoguery about migrants to try to capture media attention, while right-wing commentators put the blame for the border situation solely on Biden. 

But Republicans won’t try to solve the problem now, because they don’t want to solve the problem now. They want to focus attention on the issue in hopes of winning elections in November, so they are able to pass legislation on higher priorities like cutting taxes for rich people and corporations.

Journalists shouldn’t let them get away with that bait-and-switch. Every report on what’s happening at the border or the politics of immigration should point out clearly who is at fault — the Republicans who oppose trying to secure the border because they’re trying to get Trump elected president.