The White House appears to have banned Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) from participating in immigration reform negotiations due to a recent strain between Graham and the Trump administration, as well as other Republicans in the House and Senate.

Tensions first rose when Graham advocated for an immigration deal that failed to address President Donald Trump’s main concerns regarding chain migration and border security alongside Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). The situation worsened when the Republican senator criticized chief of staff John Kelly as never having “closed a deal before, politically” and top policy adviser Stephen Miller as being an “outlier” on immigration, according to The Washington Examiner.

“It is almost appalling to me that you have a senator that isn’t stepping up, doing the right thing,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in an interview with Fox News on Monday. “Look, we want to make a deal on DACA. We want to do these things. And the fact that he’s not part of the conversation to help move that ball forward and is instead attacking individual members of the president’s staff, I think, shows … they’re going to blame people for their own failures. And I think it’s time that they stop playing political games, come to the table, get serious and do their jobs.”

A GOP aide told the Examiner that allowing Graham to take part in immigration discussions could ruin the chances of any deal being reached on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. – READ MORE

Senator Tom Cotton hit back at Senator Lindsey Graham after the South Carolina lawmaker called him the “Steve King” of the Senate Friday.

Cotton’s response to this: difference between Steve King and Lindsey Graham is that “Steve King can actually win in Iowa.” https://t.co/vRNzcrnyiH — Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) January 19, 2018

Cotton referenced Graham’s ill fated presidential candidacy in 2016 where he dropped out in December 2015 after months of failing to garner even 1% popularity in opinion polls. The South Carolina senator admitted in a recent interview that he was “beaten like a drum” by President Donald Trump in the campaign. – READ MORE

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — who says he corrected President Trump when he allegedly made a comment about African countries being a “shithole” — made a similar comment in 2013, calling Mexico and other Central American countries a “hellhole.”

Graham, in 2013, said during a Senate panel discussion that Mexico and other countries the majority of illegal aliens are deriving from are a “hellhole.”

Graham said at the time:

The people coming across the southern border live in hellholes. They don’t like that. They want to come here. Our problem is we can’t have everybody in the world who lives in a hellhole come to America

There are 11 million people coming through the southern border ‘cause they come from countries where they can’t find work, and life is miserable. So it seems to me that if you can control who gets a job you’ve gone a long way in controlling illegal immigration. Because as long as the jobs are available in America you can’t build a fence high enough to stop people. – READ MORE