A new flurry of stories is hailing Sen. Rand Paul as “pro-immigration reform,” despite the fact that the Kentucky Republican actually opposed a bipartisan reform bill.

In fact, Paul opposed the Senate immigration reform bill even after it was amended to include a border “surge” amendment, because he said the amendment — which Sen. John McCain said would give the U.S. the “most militarized border” since the Berlin Wall — didn’t go far enough. As the bill was being debated, Paul also played into right-wing fears by claiming that undocumented immigrants were being given greater rights than American citizens.

In an interview with the anti-immigrant website WorldNetDaily yesterday, Paul’s spokesman Brian Darling insisted that while Paul appeared on a conference call with a conservative immigration reform group this week, he did not “advocate for the passage of anything.”

Darling also disputed a press release from the pro-immigration group, the Partnership for a New American Economy, which announced that Sen. Paul was “throwing his political weight behind an establishment lobby effort to get Congress to reform the country’s immigration system this year.”

He told WND that Paul’s staff “never approved any Partnership press release that said Rand Paul was going to push for immigration reform legislation this year, and we specifically asked them not to put that in any press release.”

So there you have it: Paul supports immigration reform with words, but won’t vote for a reform bill or propose one himself.