The Biden administration indicated to congressional lawmakers on Tuesday that it would be willing to support a new border agency that could deport migrants without an asylum hearing, as well as a dramatic expansion of immigration detention and deportation, in order to persuade Republicans to back aid to Ukraine.
The White House told Senate Democrats that it could support these sweeping and hardline immigration policy changes as part of negotiations over President Biden’s emergency funding request, a roughly $100 billion package that includes military aid to Israel, Taiwan and Ukraine, as well as money to bolster border enforcement and hire additional immigration agents.
For weeks, a small group of senators has been trying to strike a deal on immigration enforcement. Republicans have tied any further aid to Ukraine to policy changes aimed at reducing the unprecedented levels of illegal crossings along the southern border.
During a press conference at the White House on Tuesday, Mr Biden said his team was “working with Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to try to find a bipartisan compromise, both in terms of policy changes and [to] provide the resources we need to secure the border”. He said he had “already offered a compromise”, adding that “holding funding for Ukraine hostage to try to force an extreme Republican partisan agenda on the border is not the way to do it – we need real solutions”.
The immigration talks
In recent days, Mr Biden’s administration has stepped up its engagement with lawmakers. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas began engaging with Senate negotiators this week, three people with knowledge of his engagement told CBS News.
Mayorkas was on Capitol Hill Tuesday afternoon as lawmakers continued talks aimed at reaching a deal before Congress adjourns for the holidays. A senior Department of Homeland Security official said Mayorkas and other DHS officials were providing “technical assistance” to lawmakers and their staff, not negotiating policy proposals.
In particular, the White House has indicated that it would support a new, sweeping legal authority that would allow US border agents to summarily deport migrants without processing their asylum claims. The measure would effectively revive the Trump-era Title 42 pandemic order, allowing officials to suspend US asylum law without a public health justification.
The administration would also support a nationwide expansion of a process known as expedited removal, which allows immigration officials to deport migrants without a court hearing if they don’t claim asylum or fail their initial asylum interviews. The programme is currently limited to the border region.
In addition, the White House would be willing to order the detention of certain migrants who are allowed to enter the country pending the adjudication of their claims. It’s unclear how this provision would work, as the US government has never had the detention capacity to hold all migrants who enter the country illegally.
Administration officials and some Senate Democrats have also previously indicated a willingness to raise the initial screening standard for so-called credible fear interviews that migrants must pass to avoid being deported under expedited removal.
In a statement, White House spokesman Angelo Fernández Hernández said the administration had no “firm policy positions” in the congressional negotiations.
“The White House has not signed off on any specific policy proposals or final agreements, and reports attributing firm policy positions to the White House are inaccurate,” Fernández Hernández said. “The president has said he is open to compromise, and we look forward to continuing discussions with Senate negotiators as we work toward a bipartisan package.”
A delicate balancing act
The Biden administration’s willingness to consider broad, restrictive changes to US asylum and immigration laws, including measures similar to Trump-era policies, may increase the likelihood of Republican support for its foreign aid package. But even if a bipartisan deal is forged in the Senate, it’s unclear whether the resulting legislation would win approval in the House.
Earlier this year, House Republicans passed a bill known as H.R. 2 that included much stricter asylum and border provisions, including the reinstatement of the detention of migrant families and the so-called “Remain in Mexico” policy. It also included drastic restrictions on the humanitarian parole authority used by the Biden administration to admit hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants from Afghanistan, certain Latin American countries, Haiti and Ukraine.
The administration’s openness to negotiating restrictive immigration changes with Republicans has angered migrant advocates, progressive Democrats and Latino lawmakers, who have urged the White House and Senate Democrats not to agree to permanent asylum restrictions.
“Destroying the asylum system will not fix the southern border,” Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal said on Tuesday. “We did not spend years fighting this agenda under Trump, only to cave now to the extreme demands of Senate Republicans.”
