But as lawmakers return to Washington, some conservative members of the Camera of Representatives They are trying to make their own hardline demands on immigration due to the chaos at the southern border, a crisis that has spread to major American cities.
Senate negotiators met Monday morning as they hurriedly worked to finalize the legislative text. They had hoped to present details this week of a bipartisan initiative focused on reducing the number of migrants heading to the country’s southern border to request asylum in the United States. The small group of senators has been working on the bill for months, after Republicans insisted on tying changes in border policies to supplemental funding for Ukraine. But there were still disagreements.
“I’m more hopeful right now, even more hopeful than I was a few days ago, that we can accomplish something meaningful at the border and pass the supplemental,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said during a speech Monday. “Either way, it won’t be easy to reach the finish line.”
Biden involved in negotiations
President Joe Biden’s administration has also been directly involved in the negotiations, as the president tries to both build support for one of his top foreign policy priorities — funding Ukraine’s defense against Russia — and demonstrate “action” on a possible political weakness: his handling of the unprecedented number of migrants who claim to be asylum seekers on the southern border of the United States, most of them without meeting the requirements.
Biden has requested $110 billion for an aid package for Ukraine and Israel, as well as other national security priorities. In the Senate, Republicans have demanded that the package be tied to changes in border security.
“There is a lot at stake here,” said Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. “We have the opportunity to achieve the most significant progress in border security in a generation.”
Changes in border policy
But in the House of Representatives, conservatives have criticized any proposal that does not include the strict border measures they approved on a partisan basis last year.
House Speaker Mike Johnson and 60 other Republican representatives visited a Texas border city last week to push their case that the border proposal should be similar to what the House had already approved. Johnson said his trip only increased his determination to have border policy changes included in funding for Ukraine, calling the House initiative a “necessary ingredient.”
Over the weekend, leaders in Congress separately reached an agreement on overall spending numbers for the current fiscal year, seeking to pass an initiative that would avert a partial government shutdown in less than two weeks. But they made no mention of border policies or assistance for Ukraine, and some conservative representatives have pushed to use the possibility of a government shutdown as leverage in border negotiations.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday that Republicans must “stop threatening to shut down the government and fulfill their basic responsibility to fund critical priorities locally and of national security, including the president’s supplemental requests. It is time for them to act.”
The deadline to approve aid to Ukraine
The White House has continually pressured Congress to approve supplemental assistance to Ukraine, warning that the country cannot send any more significant amounts of military equipment without its approval. A lack of US support would dramatically weaken Ukraine’s defenses and weaken its government.
Johnson has indicated that February could be the deadline to approve financing for Ukraine, saying that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told him during his trip to Washington last month that this was when the funds would be needed.
In the Senate, where an attempt has been made to reach a bipartisan pact, even the main Republican negotiator, Senator James Lankford, has acknowledged that the final agreement will not include all of the conservatives’ priorities.
“We are always focused on what it would take for a bill to pass the House of Representatives, the Senate, and get the president’s signature,” said Sen. Krysten Sinema, an independent from Arizona who has been a key part of the negotiations.
Biden’s immigration programs continue
As the dialogue progresses, the White House continues to promote migration through humanitarian conditional permits, which it has used to allow 30,000 people from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti to enter the United States each month, as long as they have with a financial sponsor and arrive in the country by air.
Negotiators have also been discussing how to implement a new set of border protection measures, many of which are similar to those the Trump administration sought to adopt, and which would be activated once a certain threshold of daily crossings is reached. of immigrants. Defining the threshold has been particularly complicated, according to people familiar with the negotiations who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“We are certainly reducing the problems,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, who has been the lead Democratic negotiator. “We are hopeful that we will have something to present to our colleagues soon.”
Far left criticizes the changes
The upcoming package also faces criticism from the far left of the Democratic Party, as some progressive and Hispanic lawmakers have expressed concerns about policy changes that restrict migrants’ rights to seek asylum, which offers protections against persecution in their countries of origin. origin. Immigrant advocates who criticize the proposal plan to hold a rally in Washington this week.
As senators prepare to take up an issue that Congress has been unable to act on for decades, the second-ranking Democrat, Dick Durbin, said he was still waiting to see the outcome of the negotiations and expressed concern that to restrict humanitarian conditional permits in immigration matters.
“I don’t know what the final product will be, and I hope that I can give my support to the bill. But this process should have happened a long, long time ago,” Durbin said in a speech to the Senate floor.
He concluded by saying that he hoped that the negotiation in the Senate “will move us in the direction of an orderly process at our border, one that is not overwhelmed by unsustainable numbers.”
Source: With information from AP
