There are two questions lawmakers must ask themselves now that they will, supposedly, finally focus on the border: 1) Is their job to represent illegal aliens or to defend Americans first and foremost from the effects of those trying to come here illegally and those orchestrating the smuggling? 2) Is the best way to deal with the humanitarian aspect of the border crisis, which itself should be secondary to security problems for Americans, by holding the line and not letting anyone enter or by offering better accommodations for catch-and-release? Unfortunately, Senate Republicans clearly believe their job is to protect illegal aliens before Americans.

After refusing to make Democrats take a single tough vote for an entire year of this immigration crisis, after refusing to push legislation changing a single policy or pushing back against the courts that impelled this crisis, Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans are finally taking action. However, the action they are taking consists entirely of more humanitarian funding for the illegal aliens empowering cartels and smugglers, to the detriment of Americans. No changes to asylum, Flores, sanctuary cities, or judicial jurisdiction over immigration – the catalysts for this crisis – just funding for more diapers and formula.

Nobody wants to see this humanitarian crisis, but the best way to solve it is to shut it off. Then there won’t be a humanitarian crisis, because illegal aliens will be dissuaded from coming. Throwing more money at the problem in an attempt to more efficiently streamline catch-and-release will further fuel the humanitarian crisis by incentivizing more of them to come, not to mention endanger the Americans our lawmakers swore an oath to protect.

Most of the money Republicans plan to allocate in the Wednesday markup at the Senate Appropriations Committee is not even for Border Patrol and ICE, but for Health and Human Services (HHS). They are literally pumping several billion dollars more into an operation that one judge referred to as completing a criminal conspiracy, delivering self-trafficked Central American teens into the hands of family members who themselves are here illegally. Fewer than 10 percent of those sponsoring the Central American teens are here legally. Congress should allocate more funding to deport those criminal smugglers, not streamline their operation by rewarding them with the goal of their conspiracy.

Even most of the funding for DHS will be for “humanitarian aid,” not for enforcement to hold the line on the river. "We want to build a wall. We think the president's made a good case for that," McConnell said on “Fox & Friends” Monday. "That's not what this is about. This is just the humanitarian part of the problem on our side, obviously, of the border."

The problem with this assertion is that McConnell refused to fight for more enforcement funding for the first two years of Trump’s presidency. He signed away leverage on every single budget bill, including the supplemental disaster spending bill that Democrats badly wanted. McConnell could have demanded enforcement funding in return for the $19 billion in spending, yet he gave it to them for free and convinced Trump to support the bill.