After months of talks, a small group of Republicans and Democrats produced the text of a plan to clamp down on migration, but it faces an uphill path to enactment.
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The deal in Congress includes making it more difficult to claim asylum and expanding detention capacity.
Senate Republicans and Democrats on Sunday cemented a compromise plan to crack down on unlawful migration across the U.S. border with Mexico and cleared a critical hurdle to an aid package for Ukraine, but the deal faces long odds in a Congress deeply divided over both issues.
The release of the agreement, struck after more than three months of near-daily talks among senators and Biden administration officials, counted as an improbable breakthrough on a policy matter that has bedeviled presidents of both parties and defied efforts at compromise for decades on Capitol Hill. President Biden implored Congress late last month to pass it, promising to shut down the border immediately once it became law.
But Speaker Mike Johnson has pronounced it “dead on arrival” in the Republican-controlled House. And with former President Donald J. Trump actively campaigning against the deal, it was not clear whether the measure could even make it out of the Democratic-led Senate, where it needs bipartisan backing to move forward.
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, has said he plans to put the border and Ukraine packages to an initial vote as soon as Wednesday, a critical test of its ability to survive.
“I know the overwhelming majority of senators want to get this done, and it will take bipartisan cooperation to move quickly,” Mr. Schumer said on Sunday in a statement. “Senators must shut out the noise from those who want this agreement to fail for their own political agendas.”
The plan features some of the most significant border security restrictions Congress has contemplated in years, including making it more difficult to claim asylum, vastly expanding detention capacity and effectively shutting down the border to new entrants if more than an average of 5,000 migrants per day try to cross over the course of a week, or more than 8,500 attempt to cross in any given day. Encounters would have to fall to 75 percent of those thresholds for a week before those processes could be restarted.
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Source: nytimes.com
