U.S. President Joe Biden's administration is considering backing new restrictions on who can seek asylum and an expanded deportation process to secure new aid for Ukraine and Israel in a supplemental funding bill, a source familiar with the discussions told Reuters on Dec. 7, UNN reported.
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The White House and the US Congress are seeking a deal that would provide military assistance to the two allied countries while discouraging illegal immigration across the US-Mexico border. There is one week left before lawmakers go on Christmas vacation.
Republicans refused to approve increased funding for Ukraine without additional measures to reduce the record number of migrants trying to illegally cross the US border, leading to complicated negotiations that combine largely unrelated issues.
U.S. President Joe Biden, a Democrat up for re-election in 2024, said Wednesday that he is willing to make significant concessions on border security as Senate Republicans rejected a $20 billion border aid package from the Democratic Party.
The White House is ready to raise the standards of initial vetting for asylum, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.
According to the source, the Biden administration will also consider some form of "safe third country" provision that would deny asylum to migrants who pass through another country on their way to the United States.
Another possible point of the agreement could be the expansion of the expedited deportation procedure known as expedited removal. According to the source, these powers would be applied throughout the country, not at the border.
According to the source, the bipartisan group of senators trying to reach a deal is also discussing a quantitative cap on the number of asylum applications. The Biden administration's position on such a cap remains unclear.
White House spokesman Angelo Fernandez Hernandez said that Biden has made it clear that "the border is broken" and that Congress must take action to fix it.
"The president said he was open to compromise," he said in a statement.
The Republican-majority House of Representatives is scheduled to finish its work for the year by December 14, leaving little time to pass the law. The Democratic-majority Senate faces a similar time frame.
With this in mind, the goal seems to be more to strike a grand bargain and perhaps work on the exact details of the legislative text during the recess, the sources said.
Democratic Senator Chris Coons said on Thursday that the gap between his party and Republicans remains "very large," but he remains optimistic that they will be able to reach an agreement.
White House spokesperson Karin Jean-Pierre criticized Republicans during a briefing on Thursday. "They are playing with our national security," she said.
Republican Senator Tom Tillis, who is part of a bipartisan group trying to find a compromise on border security, told reporters on Wednesday that any proposal would have to cut illegal immigration at least in half and that he did not know if a deal could be reached by Christmas. "We still have a lot of work to do," he said.
To recap,
The US Senate on December 6 blocked an emergency spending bill to provide billions of dollars in security assistance to Ukraine and Israel as Republicans insisted on their demands for stricter immigration controls on the US-Mexico border.
Ukraine's Ambassador to the United States Oksana Markarova said that this does not preclude reintroduction of the draft law to be voted on in the near future.