How badly does Joe Biden want that funding for Ukraine? That's the question Republicans are asking as border negotiations tied to Ukraine funding continue this week.
If the reports about what's been agreed to are true, Republicans have already won a big victory. Senators and the White House have reached agreements on "tightening asylum interviews, expanding expedited deportations, and creating an authority to expel migrants without humanitarian screenings when border agents are overwhelmed," according to CBS News.
The devil is in the details, of course, and we won't know the extent of those concessions until the deal becomes public. But considering where negotiations began in November, these are already big changes to policies the Democrats claimed were untouchable.
Now comes word that Biden is ready to deal on immigration parole, the much-abused presidential authority that Republicans have been calling on Biden to rein in for years.
Dating back to the early 1950s, the immigration parole authority has been used by Democratic and Republican presidents to quickly welcome migrants and refugees on humanitarian grounds, such as Hungarians fleeing Soviet rule, Cuban exiles and Southeast Asians escaping communism.
But over the past three years, the Biden administration has used parole on a record scale, invoking it to resettle hundreds of thousands of Afghans evacuated from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and Ukrainians displaced by the Russian invasion of their homeland.
Officials have also used parole to try to divert migration away from the U.S. border, offering migrants from four crisis-stricken Latin American and Caribbean countries up to 30,000 spots each month to come to the country legally if they have sponsors. Under another program, the administration has been granting parole to migrants in Mexico who use a phone app to secure appointments to enter the U.S.
Right now, parole has been used to circumvent immigration laws and procedures, literally opening the border for immigrants with very little vetting. Not only is it dangerous, it's unfair to other immigrants not from favored nations.
However, modifying presidential immigration parole is opposed by many Democrats who see it as a way to dodge regular immigration channels and bring in mostly Hispanic immigrants to the U.S.
Biden wants a border deal done to get $60 billion for Ukraine and $15 billion for Israel, but the president's numbers are sinking like a stone thanks to the largest number of illegal entries into the United States in one month in history in December.
While it has so far not said much publicly about the talks, the White House internally has been aggressively trying to forge a border policy deal in the Senate due to its desire to give Ukraine more military aid and the political pressure it faces to reduce the unprecedented number of migrants crossing into the U.S. illegally, people familiar with the internal deliberations said.
In December, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) processed more than 300,000 migrants at and in between ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border, an all-time high roughly the size of the population of Pittsburgh. Roughly 256,000 of those migrants entered the U.S. illegally in between ports of entry, including a record 104,000 parents and children traveling as families, according to internal federal data obtained by CBS News.
A CBS News poll published Sunday found that over two-thirds — or 68% — of Americans disapprove of Mr. Biden's approach to the U.S.-Mexico border, an all-time high. Sixty-three percent of respondents indicated support for tougher border policies.
Besides Democratic opposition to changes in presidential parole policies, there's Republican opposition to any border bill and Ukraine funding in the House. There's a large bloc of Republicans who say they already passed a border bill and won't settle for anything less. The problem is that there are so many parts of that bill that are totally unacceptable to most Democrats and even some Republican senators that the bill was dead on arrival in the Senate when it was passed last May.
There hasn't been a major immigration bill in 35 years, and it appears there won't be one now.
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