Former President Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) appeared together for a joint press conference in Palm Beach, Florida, to promote an election integrity bill.
During a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, Trump called upon President Joe Biden to “close the border immediately,” pointing out that the United States was seeing a rise in “migrant crime” before revealing that they wanted to talk about “election interference” and “election integrity.”
“We probably have fifteen million people, and they come from places you don’t want to know about and they’re going to be big problems, and it’s getting worse,” Trump said. “It’s migrant crime. It’s a new category of crime, migrant crime. And, I’m just demanding, I just demand, as a citizen I demand, the border has to be closed. Our country cannot take it, no country could take it. It’s not sustainable by any country.”
After being introduced by Trump, Johnson explained when the House of Representatives is not in session, the Speaker of the House is “required to go around, fly around the country and be with all of our candidates and incumbents,” adding that he has been to 23 states within the past couple of weeks.
“Everywhere we go, one of the first questions people ask about is this issue of election integrity,” Johnson said. “The border’s the number one issue in America. There’s never been a political issue that scored so high in the polls as a matter of concern. And, it doesn’t matter where anyone lives, because as we say now, every state is a border state. And election integrity is tied to border, the lack of border security.”
Johnson continued to slam Biden for having created “a catastrophe” at the border, noting that they had “documented 64 specific executive actions” that he and his agencies “took under Secretary Mayorkas,” taken “from the day he walked into the Oval office” which allowed the border to be open.
In February 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered nine million border crossings at the U.S.-Mexico southern border, and more than 1.8 million gotaways, according to a press release from the House Committee on Homeland Security.
In 2023, data from the Census Bureau showed that there were almost 17 million illegal immigrants living in the United States.
Johnson continued to point out that on top of the variety of issues stemming from the “open border catastrophe” is the “threat to our election integrity.”
“You need to understand something really important about federal law. Since 1993, the National Voter Registration Act, we call it the motor voter law, allows people to sign up to vote when they get a drivers license,” Johnson explained. “If an individual only does search, or simply states that they are a citizen, they don’t have to prove it. They can register that person to vote in a federal election, and you see states are currently prohibited, believe it or not, the states are prohibited from asking someone to prove that they are a citizen.”
Johnson added that they believe this is a “serious problem.”
“What we’re going to do is, the House Republicans are introducing a bill that will require proof of citizenship to vote,” Johnson added. “It seems like common sense, I’m sure all of us would agree. We only want U.S. citizens to vote in U.S. elections. But, there are some Democrats who don’t want to do that. We believe that one of their designs, one of the reasons for this open border, which everybody asks all around the country, ‘Why would they do this? Why would they allow all of this chaos? Why the violence?’ Because they want to turn these people into voters.”
Johnson added that he and Trump would “do everything” within their power to “ensure that we do have free and fair elections in this country.”
“If we don’t have that in a Constitutional Republic, we have nothing. It’s the basis of who we are as a nation,” Johnson added. “And, we owe that to the American people. So, what we’re going to do is introduce legislation to require that every single person who registers to vote in a federal election must prove that they are an American citizen first.”
Johnson added that in addition to including “safeguards” in the bill, the bill would “require states to remove non-citizens from their existing voter rolls.”