American senators reached an agreement on Sunday on immigration and aid to Ukraine, after months of bitter debate, but the Republican President of the House of Representatives immediately promised to bury it, despite the Joe Biden’s call to “adopt it quickly”.
The deal, totaling $118.3 billion in funding, includes $60 billion in aid for Kiev’s war effort against Russia’s invasion and $14.1 billion for Israel, according to a summary released by Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray.
It also provides an envelope of 20.2 billion dollars for reforms to migration policy, the subject of fierce debate between Republican and Democratic negotiators, but above all more severe restrictions in the system for processing asylum applications with a brakes when passages exceed 5,000 people per week.
The text was quickly approved by the tenant of the White House, who highlighted the efforts made for decades to reform the country’s “failing” immigration system, while advocating a more humanist attitude than his predecessor Donald Trump, whose controversial measures led to the separation of families at the US-Mexico border.
“We reached a bipartisan national security agreement that includes the strongest and fairest migration reforms in decades. I strongly support it,” Mr. Biden responded in a statement, urging Congress to “adopt it quickly.” It must be “brought to my desk so that I can promulgate it immediately,” he added.
“Doing nothing is not an option”
To be adopted, this envelope must be approved in the Senate, where it should in theory obtain the support of elected officials from both parties, then in the House of Representatives. This is where things get complicated.
Its president, “speaker” Mike Johnson, a loyal supporter of Donald Trump, dampened Mr. Biden’s hopes. “This law is even worse than we expected and is very far from putting an end to the disaster at the border created by the president,” he reacted on X, promising that the text would be “dead on arrival” if it were to pass the House.
Joe Biden had urged the Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, to support this bipartisan agreement, despite the call from Mr. Trump, his likely future opponent in the November presidential election.
“If you believe, as I do, that we need to secure the border now, doing nothing is not an option,” he said.
The United States, by far the primary military supporter of Ukraine, has been struggling for several months to validate this envelope.
Two years after the start of a bogged-down war – and more than $110 billion already released by Congress – the Republicans, in particular, began to find the bill too steep.
Aware that the sense of emergency has faded in Washington since the start of the war in 2022, President Biden asked Congress in October to combine his request for aid for Ukraine with another of approximately Israel, ally of the United States in war against Hamas.
He also wanted to include a drastic reform of the United States’ migration policy, a politically hot topic, which is all the more so in the middle of an election year.
To be adopted, this envelope must be approved in the Senate, where it should in theory obtain the support of elected officials from both parties, then in the House of Representatives. This is where things get complicated.
“A unique opportunity”
Since the start of the conflict, the Kremlin has been banking on the decline in Western aid, and any hesitation from kyiv’s allies reinforces Russia’s belief that its bet will be a winner.
At the end of December, the United States released its last tranche of available military aid to Ukraine
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to close our open border and give future administrations the effective tools they need to end border chaos and protect our country,” agreed Oklahoma Senator James Lankford, lead Republican negotiator, in a statement.
Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called the bill “a monumental step toward strengthening America’s national security abroad and along our borders.”