Senate Democrats are deeply divided over an emerging border deal that some Democratic lawmakers fear will include harsh asylum policy reforms plucked from the House-passed Secure the Border Act in order to win GOP backing of long-delayed funding for Ukraine.
A growing number of Senate Democrats, including Latino caucus members, are sounding the alarm over leaks that say the administration is prepared to support new authority to expel migrants without asylum screenings and expand their detention and deportation.
They worry they’ll get blindsided next week if Senate negotiators reach a deal on border security and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) rushes it to the floor.
Schumer told colleagues Thursday that he plans to schedule a vote on an emergency foreign aid package that will include border security reforms next week. He said White House and Senate negotiators will work through the weekend to reach a framework agreement.
Democratic senators are concerned that Schumer plans to advance the legislative vehicle for the package before they even know the substance of the deal.
“If @SenScumer thinks he can send us home for the weekend, quietly cave to Republicans’ anti-immigrant demands while nobody is watching, and then ambush Democrats expecting us to vote yes with a smile, he is TERRIBLE MISTAKEN,” Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), a leading Democratic voice on immigration issues, posted on the social media platform X.
Menendez warned that “Schumer and those Democrats who are contemplating these proposals need to understand that these Trumpian policies will do nothing to address our challenges at the border and will only exacerbate the problem.”
Other Democrats are balking at reports that the White House is prepared to give significant ground to Republicans by agreeing to expanded executive power to expel migrants.
“I’m very concerned about the details,” said Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.). “I’ve got no details about where the negotiations are but obviously I have concerns.”
Booker said “there’s a lot of things I’m concerned about,” noting “we don’t know who’s going to be president” and thus who will be enforcing new asylum and border security laws beyond the 2024 election.
Biden is expected to be the Democratic nominee for president, while the GOP frontrunner is former President Donald Trump, who issued tough measures at the border decried by Democrats when he was last in office.
Booker said he’s worried Trump or a similar Republican president could “abuse power, violate our collective values, undermine the security and rights of all of our populations and not actually solve the problem” of having a secure border.
“Obviously, things that were in H.R. 2 do not make us safer but do violate the values” the United States adopted after World War II to address the injustice of Jewish refugees from Germany being turned away from American ports, Booker said, referring to the House’s Secure the Border Act.
Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) said “I’m always concerned when there’s serious conversations taking place with the lack of detail being shared.”
“What’s going on right now resembles that,” he said, referring to the highly secret border talks.
“How it’s being reported in the press suggests that there are many policies that have directly been taken out of H.R. 2, which is [the] product of folks like Stephen Miller, working under the Trump administration, which were politically driven and punitive toward people as opposed to solving problems,” he said, referring to Trump’s senior advisor for policy.
Luján said he’s voiced his concerns with Democratic colleagues.
“I have been doing that on this issue,” he said.
Other Democrats hold a different view
Other Democratic senators say the huge surge of migrants across the border, which now numbers 10,000 a day on average, has become a major problem that the Biden administration needs to address.
“Our borders are a mess,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said during a Fox News interview. “We have to close our borders down. We’ve got to control the borders and we have to change basically the asylum definition about what it takes to get into our country.”
