Coburn says he would oppose the president's proposal. Coburn's tickets home just went up

Sen. Tom Coburn’s plan to fix the crisis at the border doesn’t quite add up.

The Oklahoma Republican said Tuesday on that the cost of flying the undocumented, unaccompanied children home on first-class seats would only cost $8 million — but the next day, he revised his estimate to “less than $20 million.”


“For less than $20 million we can fly them all back first class,” he said on CNN Wednesday afternoon. He made a nearly identical comment on CNN’s “Crossfire” Tuesday night, but substituted $8 million for $20 million for the total cost of the first-class tickets.

He did not elaborate on how he came to either estimate.

( Also on POLITICO: Bob Goodlatte: $3.7B ‘slap in the face’)

Coburn’s office did not respond to several requests for comment.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) also jumped on the idea of flying the children home Wednesday morning in a CNN interview — but with a different cost estimate than the one Coburn offered.

“I went online earlier,” Johnson said on CNN. “There are airfares as low as $207 to return these children in a humane fashion.”

Johnson looked up five separate airfares as options for getting the unaccompanied children back to their countries of origin, he told POLITICO on Wednesday afternoon. He averaged the costs to a fare of $250 a child and found that the total cost of flying the children home — though not first class — came to $14 million.

Coburn, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, also said on “Crossfire” that he would oppose Tuesday request for additional funds to help with the surge of tens of thousands of unaccompanied children from Central America into the U.S. Over 57,000 migrant children have tried to cross the border this fiscal year according to the latest estimates. The current surge of children come mainly from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

“I’m opposing the money because it’s going to be asked for again next year,” Coburn said.

For his part, Johnson said that he would consider giving more money in funds to repatriation programs in the undocumented immigrants’ countries of origin if the laws were changed so there was an expedited adjudication process.

“If we have to spend money, I’d rather do it in those countries,” he said Wednesday afternoon.