WASHINGTON (AP) — Top Biden administration officials were laboring Wednesday to try to reach a last-minute deal for wartime aid for Ukraine by agreeing to Senate Republican demands to bolster U.S.-Mexico border policies, with urgency setting in as Congress prepared to depart Washington with the impasse unresolved.
The White House was racing to lock in a deal in principle with key Senate negotiators, which would allow them to work on the text of legislation through the holiday break, according to two people familiar with the plans who demanded anonymity to discuss them.
As details of the plan emerged, advocates for immigrants and members of President Joe Biden’s own Democratic Party fretted about the policies under discussion. Some demonstrated at the Capitol, warning of a return to the hardline border and immigration policies of the Trump era.
Congress has little time to reach an agreement on Biden’s $110 billion request for Ukraine, Israel and other national security needs that Republicans are holding up to demand changes to border policy. While White House officials and key Senate negotiators appeared to be narrowing on a list of priorities to tighten the U.S.-Mexico border and remove some recent migrant arrivals already in the U.S., Senate Republicans said that not enough progress had been made to justify staying in Washington beyond Thursday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Washington this week to implore lawmakers for support, but lawmakers were still ready to leave for weeks with one of the U.S.’s key international commitments — helping halt Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion into Ukraine — seriously in doubt. Also left hanging would be a deal on one of the most unwieldy issues in American politics: immigration and border security.
“This is difficult, very difficult,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday.