Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who’s on the campaign trail in Iowa promoting 2024 presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, spoke with NTD News about the state of the 2024 Republican presidential primary race with a week to go before the first-in-the-nation caucus and the start of the voting season.
Mr. Roy, who represents a southern border state, emphasized border security as a key issue that he says separates the Florida governor from former president and 2024 Republican front-runner Donald Trump.
“Gov. DeSantis has been a leader on the border from the time he was in Congress to now [as] the governor of Florida. He’s done a phenomenal job there,” Mr. Roy said.
The Texas Republican noted Mr. DeSantis’ decision to send National Guard troops to assist with Texas’ efforts to stem the flow of illegal immigrants and drugs across the U.S. southern border. Mr. Roy also praised the Florida governor for chartering flights carrying dozens of illegal immigrants, who’d been released by Border Patrol, to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, a move the Texas Republican said “totally transformed the conversation” on immigration and border security as the affluent Democrat-voting community treated the arrival of these flights as an emergency situation.
Mr. Roy contrasted the Florida governor’s actions on immigration and border security against those that came about under the Trump administration. The Texas Republican said the Trump administration worked with friends of his like former U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan and former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan, but said their accomplishments were like “sticking their fingers in the dike” and fell short of President Trump’s 2016 campaign promises.
“President Trump had an opportunity to push transformative legislation in 2018. And he chose to saddle up with [then-House Speaker Paul Ryan], to advance an amnesty first bill rather than a border security bill in 2018,” Mr. Roy said. “And he said he was going to sign an executive order on birthright citizenship. Never happened. Said he was going to build the wall and have Mexico pay for it. That didn’t happen either. And in fact, he then supported, like, 12 continuing resolutions after that that never dealt with the wall. So look, leadership matters, Gov. DeSantis has led. We need leadership like that to deal with the border. And so I support him wholeheartedly.”
President Trump has pledged in the 2024 campaign cycle that he will resume border wall construction projects if he’s able to return to the White House, restart the “remain in Mexico” policy ended by the Biden administration that required asylum applicants to wait in Mexico for their immigration cases to be adjudicated, and deputize National Guard and local law enforcement agencies to assist in rapidly removing illegal aliens.
On his 2024 campaign website, President Trump has also said he will designate cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, an idea he floated but did not finalize during his term in office. President Trump has further suggested he will order the U.S. Department of Defense to “inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership and operations.”
Trump’s Legal Challenges Distracting Republicans
Mr. Roy said the various court cases targeting President Trump are “politically driven” and “crazy,” but urged Republican voters to separate the issue of supporting President Trump through his legal battles from supporting the 45th president in his bid to return to the White House.
President Trump faces two federal criminal indictments and two state-level criminal indictments.
Litigants in several states have also brought lawsuits seeking to disqualify the former president from holding federal office ever again, under an interpretation of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution based on the argument that President Trump engaged in insurrectionist activity during the events surrounding the certification of the 2020 election results and the breach of the U.S. Capitol during a protest on Jan. 6, 2021.
The Colorado Supreme Court has already ruled that the 14th Amendment disqualification clause applies to President Trump and that he should be barred from appearing on ballots in the state.
President Trump has maintained his innocence throughout the various indictments and has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on whether he can be disqualified from the ballots under the 14th Amendment.
“Let’s be very clear—all of these, you know, challenges against Trump, they’re politically driven. He shouldn’t be kicked off the ballot in Colorado. That’s crazy,” Mr. Roy said. “And you know, all of these cases are being politically motivated, directed at him. But it’s still there. It’s still real.”
Mr. Roy said the various legal cases force President Trump to make the election about his legal issues.
“I think we need to move forward, not look backwards. And part of the problem with all these legal challenges is you’re constantly having to look backwards, looking back to January of ’21, looking backwards to all the different cases, rather than looking forward to what we can do for our kids and grandkids,” Mr. Roy said. “And that’s what Gov. DeSantis would offer and will offer in the White House.”
President Trump’s support among 2024 Republican primary voters has actually improved since Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg filed the first state-level criminal indictment against the former president in March, a point he has openly bragged about as special counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia have brought additional criminal charges against him.
In a recent interview, Mr. DeSantis argued that the criminal indictments against President Trump have “distorted” the 2024 primary race and “sucked out a lot of oxygen” from the contest.
The Republican House Majority
Beyond the presidential primary contest, Mr. Roy tied the Republican Party’s chances for success in the 2024 election cycle to how the party exercises its power with a narrow majority in the House over the next year.
Mr. Roy credited House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) with doing “a great job” questioning Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ handling of U.S. border security. The House Committee has scheduled a hearing on Wednesday to decide whether Mr. Mayorkas should be impeached for his handling of border security.
Mr. Roy said House Republicans should move forward with the impeachment effort.
“The guy’s completely violated his oath to the Constitution. He’s endangered the American people, endangered Texans,” the Texas Republican said. “[There’s] fentanyl pouring across our borders. Cartels being empowered. China being empowered. It’s a no-brainer.”
Ahead of the Wednesday hearing, Mr. Mayorkas insisted the Department of Homeland Security is continuing to do everything in its power to secure the border, but he put the responsibility on Congress to pass a new round of border security funding.
“We need Congress to provide the supplemental funding that President Biden requested months ago,” Mr. Mayorkas said on Monday, referencing a more than $100 billion supplemental spending request President Biden submitted, that ties several billion in new funding for border and immigration personnel to larger spending issues like continuing to fund the Ukrainian side in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. Republicans have rejected calls to simply appropriate more money for the border through the broader supplemental spending request and have instead insisted the situation warrants policy changes to tighten the immigration system.
Warning About Budget Negotiations
Mr. Roy urged Republican negotiators to exercise caution in upcoming budget negotiations.
“What we can’t do is do what Republicans always do, which is go try to go cut some watered down deal that won’t do the job in order to get something else. And that’s what I’m afraid is happening right now,” he said. “‘Oh, we need $60 billion of additional funding for Ukraine. So let’s go try to negotiate a watered down deal that won’t actually change the issues and secure the border.’ So we need to hold the line, fight to secure the border.”
He said Republicans should stick to their demands that tie such funding for Ukraine to the passage of H.R. 2, a bill that calls for the resumption of wall construction on the U.S. southern border and prohibits Department of Homeland Security personnel from processing people who illegally cross the U.S. border for entry into the country, among other policy changes and provisions.
“If you want to get Ukraine funding to pass H.R. 2, you know, if it’s that important to you, then you’ll do it. If it’s not, then move on. But I don’t want one of these like, you know, half measures and then claims of victory,” Mr. Roy said.
The Texas Republican shared these concerns as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) notified House Republicans of a tentative deal to fund the government over the weekend. Members of the staunchly conservative House Freedom Caucus, of which Mr. Roy is a member, have expressed wariness about the budget deal.
“We’ve got the speaker and a bunch of Republican leaders saying that they’re $1.659 trillion cap-busting deal is somehow good. It’s not. It expands the bureaucracy. It expands the government. It builds on Nancy Pelosi’s bloated spending bill. I oppose it,” Mr. Roy said.
“We were trying to cut the government bureaucracy last year and now we’re going to expand it. American people don’t want that. They didn’t send us to Washington to be slightly less bad than Democrats. They want us to actually lead, cut the bureaucracy, get inflation down, reduce the power of these bureaucrats against the American people. And so I think that’s what we need to do in these coming weeks if we want to have success this year, politically.”