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President Biden on Friday fought to save a bipartisan immigration deal from a breakdown in Congress, vowing to close the border if the plan becomes law despite the Republican speaker declaring the deal invalid on arrival in the House.
In a written statement delivered as Senate negotiators scramble to finalize a deal that President Donald J. Trump is pressuring Republicans to oppose, Mr. Using the harshest language, he declared the border “broken” and in “crisis.” He promised to stop immigration immediately if Congress sent him a proposal.
“What has been negotiated so far, if passed into law, would be the toughest and fairest reform to secure our nation’s borders to date,” he said. “It would give me, as president, new emergency powers to close the border in times of disruption. And if I were given that power, I would exercise it the same day I signed the bill.”
The pending compromise won’t give him many options. Under the new agreement, governments will be required to close the border to migrants attempting to enter the country without prior authorization if the number of encounters exceeds 5,000 per day, a threshold that has been raised in recent months. Exceeded on a daily basis.
Biden’s renewed effort to salvage the deal comes as Speaker Mike Johnson attempts to kill the last glimmer of hope that the deal could survive, and the deal is almost certain to get off the ground in the Republican-led House of Representatives. It was repeated a few hours later.
“If the rumors about the contents of the draft were true, the draft would have been dead on arrival in the House anyway,” Johnson wrote in a letter to House Republicans.
The latest grim predictions for the proposed border deal come after the top Senate Republican acknowledged this week that Trump’s opposition had made it politically difficult for his party to accept the plan, all but killing its chances. became.
Mr. Biden’s statement Friday night was a counterpunch to Mr. Trump’s efforts to kill the deal, with current and former commanders in chief pitted against each other in a high-stakes game over what is becoming the central issue of the presidential election. There was a fight. motion.
As the immigration plan teeters on Capitol Hill, the fate of additional aid to Ukraine is at stake, with far-right House Republicans also opposing it and threatening to remove Mr. Johnson from office if he tries to push through his opposition. .
Johnson said in the letter that the House will move forward with impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas next week, and that the House will move forward with impeachment against Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. They redoubled their demands for one or the other to be accepted into Congress. The measures are equally strict.
“Since the day I became Speaker, I have promised senators that the House will not accept any counter-proposal that does not actually solve the problems created by this administration’s destructive policies,” he wrote. Ta.
Biden’s words join a growing number of skeptical Republicans who argue that the president already has the tools and executive powers needed to significantly restrict immigration and is refusing to use them. It is unlikely to move the people who are there.
“Many voters have important questions: ‘What’s the point in negotiating new laws with a government that won’t enforce the laws we already have?'” Johnson wrote in the letter. ” he said. “If President Biden wants us to believe that he is serious about protecting national sovereignty, he needs to show good faith by taking immediate action to secure national sovereignty.”
The letter reflects a position that Johnson and other far-right Republicans in the House have held for months, repeatedly denying that the border security measures being debated in the Senate are inadequate. The deal comes as Republican promoters of the deal in the Senate struggle to muster the Republican support needed to push it through. The task becomes even more difficult as Mr. Trump, who has vehemently denied the plan, ramps up his bid to win his party’s presidential nomination.
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, told fellow Republicans privately this week that Trump’s hostility to the plan and his growing dominance in the primaries “embarrasses” the Republican Party. He said he is letting them do it.
Mr. McConnell, a leading Republican advocate of more aid to Ukraine, has been a vocal supporter of the border deal that his own party members have advocated as compensation for supporting continued aid to Kiev.
A bipartisan team of senators who have been trying for months to find a compromise to crack down on rampant immigration and drug trafficking across the southern border with Mexico agreed on a series of policy changes in recent days. Reached. These include measures to make it more difficult to secure asylum, create more detention facilities and force the government to refuse visa-free immigrants if more than 5,000 people try to enter the country illegally in a day.
The groups have not yet agreed on how much money to devote to the effort.
Many Republicans are upset that the deal does not include specific restrictions on parole. Parole is the administration’s authority to allow immigrants who are not legally admitted to the country to temporarily live and work in the United States. In Friday’s letter, Johnson called for more restrictive changes, including stricter limits on parole and a reinstatement of the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forced migrants who couldn’t be kept in detention facilities to wait outside. was asked repeatedly. He will remain in the United States until his trial date.
Some Republican opponents of the border compromise also question the wisdom of even bothering to consider it in the Senate when House members are determined to block or repeal it.
“If you’re going to take a tough vote, you want it to actually accomplish something,” said Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio. “If you can’t get it through the House, it doesn’t make much sense to force a vote on a membership that can’t accomplish anything from a policy standpoint, and it’s going to cause a lot of problems politically.”
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