Former President Trump and his allies have embarked on an aggressive campaign to deliver maximum embarrassment to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) over the border deal he blessed.

Why it matters: Facing a dead end in the House, the Senate's debate over a bill released just 24 hours ago has morphed into a proxy war between Trump and the final bastion of the GOP establishment in Congress.

• Trump allies — eager "to make Senate leadership sweat" — are counting on all 31 senators who have endorsed the former president to come out against the bill, a source familiar with the effort tells Axios' Sophia Cai.
• McConnell's original goal was to win over at least half the Senate GOP conference, which has 49 members; after a day of mass defections, support now threatens to drop into the single digits.

State of play: The Senate will vote Wednesday on whether to advance a $118 billion emergency package that pairs historic changes to immigration law with funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

• Among other reforms, the bill would raise the standard for the first step in seeking asylum and includes emergency authority to automatically turn back illegal border crossers to Mexico when numbers surge.
• At least 10 Republican votes ordinarily would be needed to overcome a filibuster, but opposition from progressive Democrats likely will drive that threshold higher.
• Ahead of a GOP conference meeting this evening, McConnell defended the bill on the Senate floor: "Senate Republicans have insisted — not just for months, but for years — that this urgent crisis demanded action."

Over in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and his entire leadership team issued this blistering statement: "Any consideration of this Senate bill in its current form is a waste of time. It is DEAD on arrival in the House."

• Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a conservative critic of McConnell, called the bill a "betrayal" and demanded new GOP leadership.
• "Wouldn't it be nice if Republican leadership in the Senate cared as much about Republicans as they do about [Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)?" tweeted Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.).

Between the lines: One unexpected casualty of the MAGA-Mitch proxy war is lead Senate negotiator James Lankford (R-Okla.), whose GOP colleagues have abandoned him in droves under pressure from Trump.

• "This is a very bad bill for his career. ... The people in Oklahoma ... they are not going to be happy about this," Trump told radio host Dan Bongino today, after falsely claiming he didn't endorse Lankford in 2022.
• Asked why Trump was attacking him, Lankford told CNN: "I don't know other than he has a different job than I have right now. His job right now is running for president. ... Obviously a chaotic border is helpful to him."

The intrigue: The Border Patrol union — which backed Trump in 2016 and 2020 — endorsed the bill today, calling it "not perfect, but far better than the status quo."

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The extreme range of reactions from three influential groups outside Congress helps illustrate why bipartisanship — especially on immigration — is such a tall task in the current political environment:

• America First Legal, a pro-Trump group founded by former Trump aide Stephen Miller, called it "one of the worst bills we have seen in a long time. It is not 'tough,' and it's only 'fair' to smugglers and cartels who will continue to profit off the disaster [Biden] created."
• The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has typically aligned itself with the GOP establishment, welcomed the "commonsense measures" in the package and said Congress "cannot afford to ignore these problems any longer."
• Amnesty International, a human rights group, said the deal contains "the most extreme anti-immigrant proposals this country has seen in 100 years" and accused Biden of pulling from "Trump's playbook of cruelty."

A bipartisan group of former lawmakers is warning No Labels that its third-party presidential campaign might cause a "constitutional crisis" by throwing the election into the House of Representatives, Axios' Hans Nichols reports.

Why it matters: Most of the previous criticism of No Labels has focused on its perceived weakness, raising the possibility that it could siphon off just enough votes from Biden in key states to tip the election to Trump.

Zoom in: The new line of attack acknowledges the potential strength of a No Labels ticket — and the prospect that it could win a few states outright.

• That would translate into actual votes in the Electoral College. If the two major party candidates are each kept under 270 electoral votes, the newly elected House would choose the president in 2025.
• In a "contingent election," the 12th Amendment gives each state one vote for president. The Senate selects the vice president.

Driving the news: In a letter to No Labels' leaders, former lawmakers — including Sens. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) and Jack Danforth (R-Mo.) and House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) — are warning the process could get messy.

• "Because the procedures are not set in the Constitution, the party with a narrow majority in the House at the start of the 119th Congress could, no doubt, adopt biased rules that advantage their favored candidate — even if the voters clearly preferred someone else," they write.
• "A contingent election would be calamitous."

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Nikki Haley has applied for Secret Service protection as a result of increased threats she's faced as Trump's last remaining opponent in the GOP primary, the former UN ambassador confirmed to the Wall Street Journal.

• "We've had multiple issues," Haley said after a campaign stop in her home state of South Carolina, which will hold its Republican primary on Feb. 24.
• "It's not going to stop me from doing what I need to do."

The big picture: Haley has unloaded on Trump in the weeks since her second-place finish in New Hampshire. Her path to winning the nomination remains exceedingly narrow, but that hasn't stopped her from raking in a flood of new donations.