Texas visit comes amid standoff over Ukraine and Israel military aid, with Republicans making border clampdown a condition for assistance
Good morning, US politics blog readers. The GOP has made keeping immigrants out of the United States a key plank of their platform, and today, around 60 House Republicans, including speaker Mike Johnson, will visit the border in Texas to make the case for a crackdown. Such trips have become routine for Republican lawmakers throughout Joe Biden’s presidency, and for the party’s presidential contenders, who have been selling voters on various ways to bar asylum seekers and others from the country, but today’s trip comes at a significant moment. The GOP has made passing stricter rules to curb the large numbers of migrants crossing into the country from Mexico its price to support military assistance to Israel and Ukraine, though the latter faces far more opposition on the right than the former.
Immigration policy is a famously difficult issue to find agreement on in Washington DC, but a small bipartisan group of senators has been negotiating for weeks to try to find a deal that will be acceptable to both parties. We’ll see if there’s any news about that today, while we also expect to hear from Johnson at 3.30pm eastern time, when he is scheduled to hold a press conference.
Tom Emmer, the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House, endorsed Donald Trump for president, a day after his superior Steve Scalise did the same.
With less than two weeks remaining before the Iowa Republican caucuses, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley said she raised $24m in the fourth quarter of 2023, more than double her previous quarterly record. Some polls have lately shown her in a distant second-place to Trump.
Karine Jean-Pierre will hold the first White House press briefing of the year at 2pm, alongside national security council spokesman John Kirby.