Ukraine and Israel aid under threat as border bill faces stiff opposition – US politics live | US politicsthedigitalchaps

The three senators who crafted the immigration policy compromise are Democrat Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Republican James Lankford of Oklahoma and Kyrsten Sinema, an independent representing Arizona.

The trio has each released their own starkly summaries of the wide-ranging bill, which highlights different aspects of it in, line with their own philosophies.

“The new border security bill does not include amnesty of any kind,” reads Lankford’s summary. It dubs the current immigration system “Catch & Release” and says the bill would replace it with “Catch & Deport”. The Oklahoman highlights one of the biggest changes the proposal would make at the border, which is automatically closing it to new arrivals if crossing reach a certain point. From his summary:

Changes the default when the border is overrun from releasing everyone into the country to deporting everyone out of the country. When the average number of crossings exceeds 5,000 people a week (which it has every week but one in the past four months) everyone crossing illegally everyday is rapidly deported out of the country without an asylum screening. In the past four months almost a million people have crossed our border. If this law had been in place four months ago, all of them would have been deported out of the country, rather than released into the country.

When the border closes, it stays closed and everyone is deported every day until the number of people crossing illegally drops. Once the number of encounters drop, the border continues to stay closed for up to an additional two weeks to continue to drive the numbers down; It closes the border when we exceed our capacity to detain and deport so no one is released into the US because of the crowd.

In his summary, Murphy highlights how the bill would offer new resources to migrants, such as work authorizations for asylum seekers, and attorneys for people facing deportation. He also notes that “Democrats rejected many of the harmful and draconian policies pushed by Republicans”, such as making it easier to deport people already in the country, and making it more difficult to obtain asylum.

Shortly after the immigration policy compromise legislation was released, Republican House majority leader Steve Scalise said the chamber would refuse to hold a vote on it:

But it was that latter part of the tweet that appears to have sparked a response from James Lankford, the Oklahoma senator who was the main Republican involved in negotiating the bill. He took issue with Scalise’s statement that the proposal would allow 5,000 undocumented people into the country per day, saying it would do no such thing:

Some Senate Democrats are also objecting to the immigration deal, arguing it unnecessarily dismantles protections for migrants.

California’s Alex Padilla argues the proposal is inconsistent with international law, and was negotiated by the wrong people:

New Jersey’s Bob Menendez also came out against it, saying the chamber was being set up to vote on the proposal without having enough time to review it. Like Padilla, he objected to Hispanic lawmakers not being involved in its negotiation. “Could you imagine a voting rights deal coming together without start-to-finish input from the Congressional Black Caucus? Unimaginable! An immigration deal without any input from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and immigration advocates should be equally unimaginable. Yet here we are,” Menendez said.

He also said the bill was too conservative. Here’s more from Menendez:

This package — which we have just begun to study — doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. These changes are permanent in nature without any meaningful relief for the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the country, including Dreamers that have lived here for a decade or more. Major chunks of this legislation read like an enforcement wish list from the Trump administration, and directly clash with the most basic tenets of our asylum system. It would permanently contort our asylum system by making it harder for asylum seekers to have their claims heard and making it impossible for asylum claims to be adjudicated at all based on arbitrarily set trigger numbers that could shut down our border.

Republican opposition grows to immigration deal

Ukraine and Israel aid under threat as immigration bill faces stiff opposition