As senators negotiate a border security and immigration reform bill tied to foreign aid, Speaker Johnson is making it clear that he and his GOP colleagues in the House may be willing to shut down the government should the White House fail to accept their proposals to severely curtail the number of asylum-seeking migrants.

A contingent of House Republicans traveled to one of the hardest-hit border crossings in the country on Wednesday — Eagle Pass, Texas — to highlight the historic number of illegal crossings. 

“One thing is absolutely clear: America is at a breaking point with record levels of illegal immigration, and today we got a firsthand look at the damage and the chaos the border catastrophe is causing in all of our communities,” Mr. Johnson said, flanked by more than 60 of his GOP colleagues. “Last month alone, we saw the most illegal crossings in recorded history. It is an unmitigated disaster — a catastrophe.”

Mr. Johnson made clear that he and his colleagues will accept nothing less than the Secure the Border Act — also known as H.R. 2 — which the House passed in 2023 but the Senate rejected. “If it looks like H.R. 2, we’ll talk about it,” the speaker said of the border and immigration bill expected to be unveiled by senators in the coming weeks. 

The Secure the Border Act would implement a number of Trump-era policies that Democrats loathe, including the continued construction of the border wall, a requirement that asylum seekers appear at ports of entry, and criminalizing visa overstays, among other things. 

The homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, who is at risk of soon being impeached by the House, hit back at the speaker during a Thursday interview with CBS News, arguING that he is doing as much as he can. 

“Everyone agrees that the system is broken, and what we are doing is enforcing our laws,” he said. “Our criminal laws, our immigration laws — and that includes our asylum laws — and when people come to the United States at the border, they are placed in immigration enforcement proceedings and those proceedings take many years because our system is broken.”

Mr. Mayorkas also said that Republican politicians — specifically Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott — are playing games with migrants by shipping them to Democrat-run cities and states up north. 

“Do you think it is responsible governance for one governor to refuse to coordinate, communicate, cooperate with other state officials around the country and just unilaterally bus people to another locality without informing the receiving locality so that we can work together to address a challenge that our country faces?” the secretary asked the host, Tony Dokoupil. “Is that the type of patriotism and governance that we expect of our officials?”

Negotiations surrounding border and immigration enforcement reform kicked off late last year after the Department of Defense made it clear that the administration only had enough money for one more aid package for Ukraine before Congress needed to act. President Biden had previously sent a national security supplemental budget — totaling more than $100 billion — that would address Ukraine aid, security assistance for Free China, weapons for Israel, and more money for border security. 

Mr. Johnson said that the supplemental budget did not do nearly enough to address America’s own national security. “If President Biden wants a supplemental spending bill focused on national security, it better begin with defending America’s national security,” he said during his press event at Eagle Pass. “We want to get the border closed and secured first.”

When asked about the possibility of a government shutdown, Mr. Johnson and his colleagues said that securing the border was a prerequisite to keeping the government open. “It’s too early to prejudge any of that,” he said of a government shutdown. 

One Texan, Congresswoman Beth Van Duyne, said local officials and border patrol agents asked her and her colleagues to “hold the line” and use “the power of the purse” to force border and immigration changes. 

“None of us want to shut down the government, but we all recognize the fact that every single penny that we are giving to homeland security at this point that is not being used to secure our border, that is not being used to increase our national security … is hurting our national security,” she said. 

The Republicans’ trip to the border comes just days before the House Homeland Security Committee is set to begin impeachment proceedings against Mr. Mayorkas. The committee announced in a statement that a January 10 hearing was necessary due to Mr. Mayorkas’s “failed leadership and his refusal to enforce the laws passed by Congress.”

The chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Congressman Mark Green, a 20-year special operations Army veteran who once spent a night interrogating Saddam Hussein, said Wednesday that he sees the impeachment of Mr. Mayorkas as one of his committee’s top priorities in the new year. 

“The greatest domestic threat to the national security and the safety of the American people is Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas,” Mr. Green said, eliciting applause from other Republicans. “He — through his policies — has defied and subverted the laws passed by the United States Congress. He has defied multiple court orders. He has lied numerous times to the United States Congress.”