Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina clashed with Fox News host Martha MacCallum on Monday over a foreign aid and border security package, claiming that proponents of the bill are being dishonest.

Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma negotiated the bill with Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona; Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington released the text of the legislation Sunday. Many House Republicans indicated the bill was dead on arrival, leading MacCallum to grill Mace about the legislation.

“People were told, the funding for Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan wouldn’t happen unless we did something at the border first,” MacCallum told Mace after playing comments by Lankford defending the legislation. “So then these negotiators get together, they work on a program to at least start to chip away at some of the problems that exist on the border, they come up with something and now Republicans, many of them, including yourself are shutting it down. What do you say to the American people about that?”

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“This bill keeps the border wide open,” Mace responded. “There’s so many loopholes in this bill it’ll make your head spin, and any Republican that supports it supports open borders, because it’s going to allow Secretary Mayorkas to have full discretion on who comes in above that 5,000 limit, it lowers the standard for those that are seeking asylum and look, the American people are tired of being an ATM machine for the illegal aliens that are coming across our border every single day and the more that I read, the language in this bill, the more frustrated I get with it. It’s not what we’re being sold.”

MacCallum pressed Mace on whether she read the bill, with the South Carolina Republican saying she still had 50 pages to go in the legislation, which provides $60 billion in aid to Ukraine and $14 billion to Israel.

“When you have a loophole on the other side on the very next page in the bill that puts a squash on any of that that you’re talking about there and allows bureaucrats to make the decisions rather than courts, that waters down the reasoning behind those seeking asylum, lowers the standard for those seeking asylum, that’s what we’re talking about here,” Mace said in response after MacCallum outlined some provisions in the bill. “That’s the language that we’re reading in the bill.”

“Part of what I can tell is we’re not being told the truth here about the bill and I’m going to put out a statement that goes through it page by page just like I did that bad debt ceiling bill last year that will outline to the American people what the truth is because they deserve nothing but the truth,” Mace added.

United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported over 302,000 illegal immigrants came across the U.S.-Mexico border in December after nearly 380,000 illegal immigrants were encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border during the first two months of fiscal year 2024, which started on Oct. 1, according to data released by the agency. CBP also reported over 5.8 million encounters in fiscal years 2021, 2022 and 2023.

Lankford did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Harold Hutchison on February 5, 2024