Tough new measures being discussed on Capitol Hill to clamp down on migrants include a new federal requirement to “shut down” the Mexico border if more than 5,000 undocumented people cross into the US daily and plans to swiftly throw out economic migrants, a key senator revealed on Sunday.
Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who broke from the Democratic party in 2022 to become an independent, gave CBS’s Face the Nation a sneak peak at steps that she and other Senate negotiators have been working on, as the upper chamber of congress prepared to release the text of a new immigration bill.
They include a new requirement on federal agencies to close the border temporarily should the number of people presenting themselves at the US-Mexico line reach 5,000 people a day.
When the number approaches 4,000 people a day, the US government would also be granted the power to voluntarily turn away all people presenting at border stations to give time for the asylum application processing to catch up, she said.
At other times, migrants would be taken into short-term detention as their claims for asylum were rapidly assessed. Anyone failing to meet the standards for a claim would be “swiftly returned to their home country”, Sinema said.
“We believe that by quickly implementing this system, individuals who come for economic reasons will learn very quickly that this is not a path to enter our country and will not take the sometimes dangerous or treacherous trek to our border,” she told the Sunday morning TV show.
Alongside the faster deportation provisions, the draft bill would also speed up the time needed to process successful asylum applications. “Folks who do qualify for asylum will be on a rapid path, six months or less, to start a new life in America,” Sinema said.
Sinema is a member of a small bipartisan group of senators attempting to reach consensus on how to deal with the crisis at the border in which migration levels have reached record high levels. The talks, which also involve the Democratic senator from Connecticut Chris Murphy and Republican James Lankford from Oklahoma, are seen as a way of simultaneously unlocking aid to Israel and Ukraine.
The draft Senate bill meets several of the demands that have been raised by Republicans who have accused the Biden administration of failing to secure the US border. In particular, it proposes an end to the system of allowing people to remain in the US while their asylum applications are processed – a procedure that has been seized upon by Republicans, who call it dismissively “catch and release”, as a stick with which to beat Joe Biden.
With opinion polls suggesting that the president’s approval ratings are dipping at the start of the presidential election year as public concern about the situation at the US border rises, the White House has signaled that it is also willing to take a tougher approach to immigration. Last month, Biden said that if the Senate bill under discussion reached his desk to sign, he would “shut down the border” immediately. As many as 10,000 migrants a day have been encountered crossing the US-Mexico border without necessary immigration papers or an appointment with the US authorities.
But the Senate bill is likely to be blocked by Republican leaders in the US House who are following Donald Trump’s lead and opposing the deal. The former president, who is running for re-election, has made it clear that he does not want to see Biden presented with a legislative win on the border crisis just months before the two rivals’ probable presidential election face-off in November.
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Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, has said the Senate bill would be “dead on arrival” were it to reach his chamber. On Saturday he also made a pre-emptive move that could further imperil the chances of the Senate bill ever becoming law by announcing that he would bring to a vote on the House floor a separate $17.6bn military aid package for Israel.
Johnson was asked by NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday whether his aid for Israel plan was a ruse to kill the Senate compromise deal on the border. He was also asked whether he was merely doing Trump’s bidding, with Trump “calling the shots”.
“Of course not,” the speaker said. “He’s not calling the shots, I am calling the shots for the House – that’s our responsibility.”
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader in the House, was scathing about Johnson’s tactical gambit in an interview with ABC News’ This Week. “How can a bill be ‘dead on arrival’ and extreme Maga [Make America Great Again] Republicans in the House have not even seen the text? They don’t even know what solutions are being proposed,” he said.
Jeffries derided House Republicans as “wholly-owned subsidiaries of Donald Trump”.
With the numbers of migrants turning up at the border remaining high, and with the presidential election year getting underway, immigration is set to continue to cause ructions on both sides of the political aisle. While there is heated debate within the Democratic party over Biden’s increasingly aggressive stance towards immigration, it is also proving contentious within Republican circles.
On Sunday Nikki Haley, Trump’s only remaining presidential rival, accused Trump of “playing politics” with the border with his attempt to scupper the Senate deal. “You shouldn’t be getting involved telling Republicans to wait until the election because we don’t want this to help Biden, when we can’t wait one more day,” Haley told CNN’s State of the Union.
Texas congresswomen Sheila Jackson Lee told CNN that she was “a problem solver” but she would be concerned if senate proposals “jeopardize legal immigration or separates families”.
