The White House entered the Senate talks on Ukraine funding and immigration Tuesday afternoon, trying to break the stalemate by using momentum from Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s personal plea for assistance earlier in the day.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, along with aides to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, joined the bipartisan talks, and President Joe Biden reportedly offered big concessions to Republicans on immigration. Those include “a new border authority to expel migrants without asylum screenings, as well as a dramatic expansion of immigration detention and deportations,” according to CBS News. Those are among the hard-line demands of the GOP that some congressional Democrats have rejected.
Sen. Alex Padilla of California told Punchbowl News he’s concerned that Biden might consider a reboot of the Title 42-like authority that the previous administration used to expedite the deportation of undocumented migrants. He also doesn’t want Biden to agree to limiting migrants’ ability to apply for asylum. “It’s just adding to my list of concerns about how the talks are going,” Padilla said. “We should not return to Trump’s failed policies.”
It’s not a given that Republicans will accept it. As of midday Wednesday, two of the GOP senators involved in the talks wanted more out of Biden. Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma complained that they hadn’t received anything on paper yet from the administration. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said that the GOP was going to have to put some “meat” on the administration’s offer to “test whether or not they’re serious.”
That could be a delaying tactic on the part of Republicans. Both the House and Senate are scheduled to leave on Thursday for the long holiday recess, and House Speaker Mike Johnson is inclined to keep that schedule. If the Senate can’t show that it’s close to an agreement by Thursday, Johnson is likely to recess the House, preventing any action on the supplemental aid request that doesn’t just include funds for Ukraine but also for Israel and Taiwan.
Johnson has painted himself into a corner with the hard-liners in his House GOP conference in a series of missteps on another issue. Johnson agreed to a temporary extension of the government’s warrantless surveillance powers, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, in the House-Senate conference agreement on the National Defense Authorization Act. That enraged two of his committee chairs—House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan and House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner—who have competing FISA reauthorization bills. At one point, Johnson promised to hold floor votes on those bills instead of allowing the temporary reauthorization.
Now he has a very angry Jordan seemingly speaking for the rest of the Freedom Caucus, insisting that there is no compromise on immigration. “You gotta go back to the policies that work,” Jordan told Punchbowl News. “Remain in Mexico. You come across, we’re going to detain you. We’re not going to release people in the country. That’s what it all boils down to. Short of that, I don’t think you get Republicans to go along with something they’re against anyway.” This is probably not a fight Johnson wants to have right now.
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