GEOFF BENNETT: As we have been reporting, Title 42, the pandemic error rule that served two presidents as a border policy Band-Aid, will expire one minute before midnight Eastern time.

That is as Congress is up against another ticking clock, with the debt limit impasse threatening the national and global economies.

Texas Republican Congressman Chip Roy is an influential voice in the House Freedom Caucus and these debates, and he joins us now from Capitol Hill.

Welcome back to the "NewsHour," sir.

REP. CHIP ROY (R-TX): Thanks.

Great to be on.

GEOFF BENNETT: So, House Republicans passed their immigration bill today called the Secure the Border Act.

It's heavily focused on enforcement.

Not expected to get a vote in the Senate, which Democrats control.

But it does reflect Republican immigration priorities.

How would this bill alleviate the pressure that border communities are facing right now and strengthen border protection?

REP. CHIP ROY: Yes, thanks.

So, first of all, I wouldn't say that addresses immigration.

It is in fact designed to be a border security-focused piece of legislation.

It is designed to, frankly, force the administration's to do what current law actually requires the president to do, which is to maintain operational control of the border.

And, in fact, they are losing control.

I have gotten text messages today from Border Patrol agents and members of the Texas Department of Public Safety, DPS, telling me that they are effectively at a broken arrow situation.

They have got overrun facilities, that they have got Chinese nationals coming across, that they have lost complete control of being able to maintain it.

You have got El Paso has declared a state of emergency.

You have got Brownsville that has declared a state of emergency.

Laredo has declared a state of emergency.

San Antonio is preparing for overwhelming amounts of migrants in their centers in San Antonio.

The reality is, we have a crisis at the border that is getting worse.

And it is because the president and because Secretary Mayorkas has basically been using loopholes to force the releases of people into the United States, which is causing the flood at the border.

And our legislation would end those loopholes.

It would stop the abuse of asylum and it would stop the abuse of other provisions of law from unaccompanied children and so forth to cause releases in the United States, which is actually endangering the migrants in question, 856 dead migrants along South Texas in the Rio Grande found on ranches, 856, 53 cooked in a tractor trailer in San Antonio, Texas, last summer, millions of immigrants coming up to our border.

And you got 72,000 dead Americans from fentanyl pouring into our communities because we're not policing the border.

GEOFF BENNETT: Let me ask you this.

REP. CHIP ROY: We need to do something about it.

And this bill would do that.

GEOFF BENNETT: Well, can anything short of comprehensive immigration reform solve this problem?

We heard from the DHS Secretary Mayorkas today say that there are 20 million displaced people across the Western Hemisphere.

Suggests to me that there's no end in sight to this immigration problem.

REP. CHIP ROY: Of course there is.

We're a sovereign nation.

This is the problem.

My Democratic colleagues do not believe that we're a sovereign nation.

We do have laws.

We do have doors that are open for people to come here legally.

We do have asylum protections.

And the bill that we passed today allows for asylum to be claimed and processed.

What it doesn't allow is for people to bum-rush our border and get released into the United States.

The fact that there are lots of people in the world who would like to have a better job and come to this country, God bless them.

I do not begrudge them.

But we are undermining the rule of law that causes people to want to come to this country.

We are undermining the Western Hemisphere.

We are empowering China.

Talk to the moms, the three moms, the fentanyl moms who lost their kids that I had breakfast with in Austin last Friday morning.

Talk to the parents of the four dead children in my school district where my kids live, where we live in, Hays County, Texas, and who have lost their kids to fentanyl.

Talk to them.

Talk to the thousands of grieving families that have lost their loved ones to fentanyl, because we're allowing China to have control of our border, because the cartels have control of our border.

That's the reality.

You could stop it right now with our legislation.

There are 12 people that stand between chaos and security.

And it's 11 Democrats in the Senate and the Democratic president in the White House.

GEOFF BENNETT: While we have you, I want to ask you about the debt ceiling impasse.

That meeting that was planned at the White House on Friday, as we have reported, has now been punted to next week.

GEOFF BENNETT: I spoke with the Democratic House leader, Hakeem Jeffries, on this program yesterday, and asked if Congress can raise the debt ceiling while Democrats and Republicans arrive at a budget agreement on parallel tracks.

That way, the two aren't directly linked, everybody gets what they want, and everybody can claim victory.

He says that Democrats are ready to have that discussion.

Are House Republicans?

REP. CHIP ROY: Well, look, I'd love to talk to Hakeem and see what he actually means by that.

I mean, if you get to the end result where we actually reduce spending, and do what we need to do to stop the fiscal insanity, while we manage and go through and figure out the debt ceiling along the terms of the deal that we throw out, certainly happy to have whatever conversation gets us to that end result.

But what we're not going to do is negotiate against ourselves.

We're not going to be saying, well, we will give you this and give you this.

They need to come forward with a proposal and figure out how we're going to get there.

You want to have a short-term debt ceiling increase to try to do it, well, then that's going to cost something too.

We're not just going to do a three-month extension, which would also be a clean extension, borrowing more money, without some fiscal reforms.

But we can maybe buy some time and get there.

I'm open to ideas.

But what we're not going to do is back away from what we have already put out as our proposal.

The president needs to step up to the plate, as he did when he was vice president and he negotiated a deal in 2011, as he did when he was a senator in '94, '84, and other times.

He's been very clear that you need to come to the table without just raising the debt ceiling with a blank check and not actually getting fundamental fiscal reforms, which is what we're trying to do.

GEOFF BENNETT: You were a leading opponent early on of Kevin McCarthy's bid for the House speakership and led a group of House Republicans who basically extracted concessions from him, among them, deep spending cuts.

Can Kevin McCarthy, could he ever, is there a universe where he could bring a clean bill to the floor to raise the debt ceiling with no concessions and keep his speakership?

REP. CHIP ROY: We -- he's not going to bring a clean debt ceiling bill to the floor, because that is not something that Republicans got elected to do.

He's not going to do that.

GEOFF BENNETT: All right.

Chip Roy, Congressman from Texas, Republican, thanks for being with us.

REP. CHIP ROY: Hey, thank you all.