As record numbers of illegal immigrants surge at the southern U.S. border, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has told Congress the country’s “broken” immigration system is in need of a top-to-bottom update.
Pushed to the negotiating table by Republicans, the Biden administration is considering restricting the asylum and humanitarian parole process in exchange for approval of the president’s $106 billion year-end request for Ukraine, Israel and national security needs. It comes as Mayorkas, the face of the administration’s immigration policy, faces impeachment proceedings from House Republicans over what they view as failed border policies.
“We’re not going to try to secure other countries and not secure ours,” Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma said as he rolled out the Senate GOP’s border effort earlier this month.
“We’re at a point for three years we’ve been saying, ‘When are we going to secure the country? When are we going to do this?’ And every year it’s gotten worse.”
A core group of senators, Republicans and Democrats, has been eyeing a deal that would provide money for the wars overseas in exchange for changes to the asylum process.
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Negotiating behind closed doors, the senators have discussed making it tougher for illegal immigrants to pass initial screening used by asylum officers to decide whether a person can stay in the country to pursue their asylum case.
The idea is to raise the threshold during what’s known as the initial credible fear interview for asylum claims from a “significant possibility” of success before an immigration judge to “more likely than not,” according to those familiar with the private talks and who were granted anonymity to discuss them.
While an overwhelming majority of asylum-seekers clear the initial interviews, the final approval rate is much lower. That’s fueling critics’ complaints that the screening standard is too low and allows many asylum-seekers to remain in the country for years while their cases wind through backlogged courts and eventually fail.
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Additionally, the senators are discussing ways to restrict Biden’s ability to tap a historic Eisenhower-era law he and other presidents have relied on to admit people temporarily into the country under humanitarian parole — from the Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians in the late 1970s to Iraqi Kurds who helped the U.S. in the 1990s Gulf War and Cubans who fled their country at various times, according to data from the Cato Institute.
Biden tapped the parole program for Ukrainians fleeing after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion in 2022 and has also used it to allow Afghans, Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians and Nicaraguans to remain temporarily in the U.S. without threat of deportation.
The administration and some immigrant advocacy groups argue Mayorkas is utilizing the tools available to reduce the chaos at the border as Congress has failed to act on more comprehensive immigration improvements.
But Republican critics of Biden’s approach said the White House is overreaching by using parole authority to allow hundreds of thousands to enter the U.S. in ways Congress did not intend.
“The real sticking point is asylum is not enough if we don’t get progress on parole,” said Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina.
On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson told GOP senators behind closed doors that he needs real border security changes as part of Biden’s broader war funding package.
But during a separate Defense Department classified briefing on the need for Ukraine aid, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he told Johnson and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell that the GOP demand for border security “is extraneous to this, and it shouldn’t have been brought up.”
“I said, ‘We’re willing to compromise, but we need a bipartisan bill on border,’” Schumer told The Associated Press. “You can’t pull it so far, as they’ve been trying to do.”
Biden’s team is desperate for improvements at the border, where its administration has tallied more than 2 million arrests for illegal crossings in each of the last two years — the highest ever recorded — and more than twice as many from the year before COVID.
As Biden seeks re-election next year, he is potentially facing Republican front-runner Donald Trump, an immigration hardliner, who is campaigning on launching the “largest domestic deportation” operation in U.S. history.
The Biden administration is not overtly involved in the negotiations on Capitol Hill, but it has not warned Democrats off making a deal with the Republicans. Mayorkas has been on calls with senators of both parties in recent days as talks continue.
The Western Journal has reviewed this Associated Press story and may have altered it prior to publication to ensure that it meets our editorial standards.
