The Senate is pressing forward with a bipartisan proposal intended to clamp down on illegal border crossings, even though it faces a likely defeat in Congress.

Senate negotiators on Sunday night released a $118 billion package of border enforcement policy and funding for Ukraine, Israel and other U.S. allies, hoping that the details would win over skeptics. The bill represented a rightward tilt in Senate negotiations over border measures, yet the backlash was intense from conservatives. They savaged the border policy proposal as insufficient, with former President Donald Trump leading the charge.

“This is a gift to the Democrats. And this sort of is a shifting of the worst border in history onto the shoulders of Republicans,” Trump, the likely Republican presidential nominee, said Monday on “The Dan Bongino Show.” “That’s really what they want. They want this for the presidential election so they can now blame the Republicans for the worst border in history.”

Many Senate Republicans — even those who have expressed support for Ukraine aid and the contours of the border policy changes — raised doubts Monday they would support the package. A private Republican meeting was scheduled in the evening to discuss it. Still, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer moved toward a key test vote on Wednesday.

  • @givesomefucksEnglish
    4•9 months ago

    Biden, speaking to reporters at a Las Vegas meeting with members of a culinary union, noted that Congress has not approved his funding requests for more Border Patrol agents and immigration judges to handle the number of migrants. “We need help,” he said. “Why won’t they give me the help?”

    Title 42 was a trump era policy that kicked most of them back immediately, and crossing illegally costs money, it’s not people just walking across. They often have to give up their life savings to a coyote.

    So during title 42 people stopped trying and saved money. That’s why a month after it ended was when the crossing rate skyrocketed.

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/29/us/illegal-border-crossings-data.html

    “Everything in that bipartisan bill gives me control,” Biden said, adding that he was disappointed the border legislation does not address the fate of immigrants who as children entered the U.S. without authorization.

    This is the bit where if this passes, a president can unilaterally shut legal crossings down.

    The new permanent power pushed by Biden and Senate negotiators is in line with temporary, Covid-era restrictions originally put in place during Trump’s administration, but which lapsed last year on Biden’s watch.

    https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/29/politics/border-shutdown-biden-what-matters/index.html

    Biden wants to take something trump temporarily did (and was rightly criticized for doing) and give every future president the explicit power to do it indefinitely.

    And if he doesn’t get it, Ukraine doesn’t get aid.

    That’s not even getting into the fact that title 42 only “worked” because potential crossers expected it to expire.

    If this new power goes into effect, and republicans always invoke it, all it’s going to do is make illegal immigration under Democrat presidents a constant issue, unless they always use it.

    It’s a terrible fucking idea.