Lawmakers return to Capitol Hill next week with unfinished business on immigration and border security as other time-sensitive obligations compete for their attention.
Senate negotiators and aides have spent the holiday recess working through sticking points in a prospective border policy deal that Republicans demanded in exchange for approving new aid to Ukraine. Now senators face an uphill battle to lock in an agreement, finalize text, and pass a bill.
Across the Capitol, Republicans have another idea about how to address the border situation: impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whom they blame for record-high migrant encounters across much of President Joe Biden’s term.
The convergence of border-related drama on the Hill this month — while Congress must also act to prevent a partial government shutdown — sets the stage for a tumultuous year of immigration politics and legislative maneuvering in the lead-up to the November election.
Congressional negotiations come to a head as overall border numbers soar. The Border Patrol logged more than 190,000 migrant encounters between ports of entry along the southwest border in November, a dip from the same time a year before but still staggeringly high compared with the past two decades of data on apprehensions.
“That only makes things more complicated because it creates more urgency to do something on the border,” said Cris Ramón, senior adviser at the Hispanic civil rights organization UnidosUS.
Border Talks
The Senate’s core group of negotiators — Sens.
The group is discussing how to update asylum eligibility to weed out weak cases more rapidly and make it easier for US officials to expel migrants at the border when agents are overwhelmed.
Republicans have also pushed for increased deportations of undocumented immigrants already living in the US and restrictions on the use of humanitarian parole status for border-crossers. The contours of a deal are in flux.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre struck an optimistic chord Tuesday, saying the Senate talks have been productive.
“Now what we hope is that when Congress gets back, we’ll be able to act and get these things moving forward so we can deal with this issue,” she said on CNN.
Lawmakers hope negotiators have basics of a deal ironed out in time to brief colleagues when the Senate returns from recess next week, Sen.
Any deal’s prospects remain highly uncertain in the House, where many Republicans have insisted on the stricter measures they included in a border bill (
“If he’s the one who has played the arsonist here and burned down our border and our asylum system, why on Earth would you negotiate with him or trust him?” said Lora Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Impeachment
Homeland Security Chairman
It’s the capstone of a months-long investigation where an impeachment bid always appeared to be the unspoken goal, even as lawmakers insisted they would follow the facts wherever they led.
In November, before the investigation was complete, all Republicans on the homeland panel voted to proceed with a fast-tracked impeachment resolution against the secretary. Eight other Republicans joined Democrats to instead send the matter to the committee, and Green said he aimed to finish building a case that would win over the holdouts. His team released its final report on Mayorkas last month.
DHS spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg called the effort a “baseless attack” that distracts from national security priorities. Rep.
“They’ve only shown the American people it is nothing more than a political stunt without any foundation in the Constitution,” he said in a statement to Bloomberg Government last week.
Mayorkas Faces GOP Ire After Lawmakers’ Failed Impeachment Bid
House Republicans are simultaneously pursuing an impeachment inquiry against Biden, focused on family business dealings. It remains to be seen how they’ll juggle the two efforts and whether the Mayorkas push will again take a back seat, as it did in mid-2023.
Border Operations, Campaigns
Lawmakers foreshadowed the parallel impeachment and dealmaking tracks around this time last year. In early 2023 Sinema, fresh off a failed effort at a bipartisan border compromise, pledged to make an immigration deal her priority and eyed GOP-backed restrictions as a starting point.
In the House, Republicans who had just taken the majority kicked off a series of border trips and trumpeted plans to hold Mayorkas accountable for what they saw. They’re keeping up the momentum this year. Newly installed Speaker
“Border and immigration continues to be a challenge for lawmakers in both parties and the push to come to some sort of legislative solution is going to continue, a lot of which will be motivated in part by former President Donald Trump,” said Maunica Sthanki, political strategist and former Democratic immigration aide on the House Judiciary Committee.
Trump has doubled down on anti-immigrant rhetoric in recent campaign stops, arguing that migrants crossing the border were “poisoning the blood of our country.” Biden has rebuked the former president and compared his remarks to the philosophies of Adolf Hitler. But critics say Biden’s own increasingly enforcement-oriented immigration positions have strayed far from his 2020 campaign promises to make the system more fair and humane.
Fraught Border Talks Leave Democratic Immigration Agenda in Cold
“The ground has shifted beneath us,” said Jorge Loweree, managing director of programs and strategy at the immigrants’ rights advocacy group American Immigration Council. “The debate is in an altogether different place than it was not that long ago.”
For Biden and other Democrats facing pressure to do something to crack down on illegal border crossings, whether the shift to the right will pay off remains in question.
“You will likely see Republicans continue the line that it’s the Biden border crisis,” Ramón said. “For Democrats, it gets complicated. They want to be seen like they’re doing something on the border, but the question for them is if numbers continue to stay high, what are they going to say in that situation?”
Erik Wasson in Washington also contributed to this story.
To contact the reporter on this story:
To contact the editors responsible for this story: