Immigration was a top issue for 70 percent of voters in the 2016 presidential election, including 79 percent of Trump supporters, according to Pew Research. Immigration was once again top of the ticket in the 2024 election, with a June Pew Research poll finding 63 percent of Republican voters favored a “national effort to deport all immigrants living in the country illegally.
At the 2024 Republican National Convention, attendees held signs reading “Mass Deportations.”
President Donald Trump campaigned and won on that promise. Which is why the current Texas Senate runoff is so important in Trump’s fulfillment of that campaign promise.
Incumbent John Cornyn is headed to a runoff against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt. But a look back on Cornyn’s record on immigration puts him at odds with what the MAGA base wants.
Just recently Cornyn told The Washington Examiner that while “we don’t want to ever displace American workers … the fact is, virtually all of us, sometime or another in our family history, came from somewhere else, and to me, that’s one of our great assets, is our legal immigration system.”
Cornyn said he would continue to have that conversation with the President. It’s similar justification he gave more than a decade ago when he proposed legislation that would end the Green Card lottery and allocate those H-1B visas to graduates with master’s and doctoral degrees. Cornyn said his legislation would “bolster American competitiveness and provide a stronger foundation for long-term economic growth and job creation.”
“We have to remember how this country was built. All of us are sons and daughters of immigrants that showed up here and made our way. We’ve cut off that flow,” Cornyn added.
Those comments are part of a years-long weak posture on the border crisis and immigration writ large.
In 2016, as Trump was campaigning on building a border wall, Cornyn called the idea “naive.”
“I would hope that we would talk with a little bit more precision about what we mean when we talk about border security. This idea that all you can do is build some obstacle and people won’t go come over it, or go under it, or go through it is naive,” he said.
He also said its “certainly not my sense” when asked if he thought Trump “understood the border issue,” ABC News reported.
Notably, Trump did go forward building a wall. Data from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shows that in 2020, “In one short 12 mile section in the San Diego Sector, the wall reduced CBP manpower requirements by 150 agents every 24 hours. That is approximately a $28 million return on investment per year in salaries and benefits. These agents were redeployed to fill resource gaps in other areas of the border — further improving our security.”
In the Yuma Sector, “Illegal entries in areas with new border wall system plummeted over 87% in FY 20 compared to FY 19,” according to DHS.
As Texas Scorecard‘s Cary Cheshire wrote in 2018, “Conservatives … voted en masse for Donald Trump and Texas’ other U.S. Senator, Ted Cruz, largely because they pledged to hold firm on refusing to support amnesty for illegal immigrants.”
Yet Cornyn said Republicans would have to strike a deal with Democrats in order to obtain money for border security and in turn, he pushed to legalize the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, despite acknowledging its illegality.
“We agree [with district judge Andrew Hanen’s 2018 preliminary injunction] that the DACA program contravenes the Immigration and Nationality Act and believe it was likely unconstitutional when issued by President Obama,” Cornyn and Sen. Thom Tillis said in a statement.
Notably, Trump proved in 2025 that Republicans never need to make concessions in order to obtain border security — successfully shutting the southern border down without granting amnesty to illegal aliens.
Cornyn has also expressed willingness to trade border security for — as described by ABC News — a “guest-worker program that would allow agricultural workers and others to be employed in the U.S. legally on a temporary basis.”
Regarding the estimated 11 million illegal aliens present in the United States at that time, Cornyn said: “Someone after a certain period of time on probation could work here and they could stay in the United States, but not necessarily be a citizen,” according to ABC News.
Cornyn also co-sponsored (alongside Democrats) the Bipartisan Border Solutions Act that would, in part, expand “legal orientation programming and translation services, and protects access to counsel for migrants.”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
