Senate Immigration Reform Negotiators Say Legislation Could Come To The Floor as Soon as This Week

Senate negotiators currently working on an immigration reform and border security bill say they are making good progress on the legislation and they hope it will be made public in the coming days. The two lead negotiators — Republican Senator Lankford and Democratic Senator Murphy — have been accused by their respective party members of giving away too much. “I do feel very positive about it because even the initial feedback has been good,” Mr. Lankford said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday of his Senate GOP colleagues. He says he has faced significant pushback on social media only because the details of the deal have been leaked — details which are not accurate, he says. “Everyone’s looking to be able to read the bill at this point,” he says. “That’s the key aspect, we’re working on the final aspects of it to try to be able to get it out. … Right now, they’re all functioning off of internet rumors of what’s in the bill, and many of them are false.” Mr. Lankford would not elaborate about which aspects of the bill are inaccurate, though CNN has reported that the legislation would close the border if weekly crossings hit 5,000 per day on average. He said his fellow Republicans will be able “to see the dramatic change [to] how we handle our immigration system, and how we work to be able to secure our border completely.”He says a key component of the deal will be to reinstate an expulsion mechanism similar to Title 42. “Right now, as the United States, we’ve reached crisis points,” Mr. Lankford says. “For instance, when we get 4,000 or 5,000 people crossing the border, we can no longer process those individuals. So right now, the Biden administration is just releasing them into the country.”The negotiation framework — which was leaked to a conservative immigration think tank — includes work permits for migrants who cross the border, an increased number of visas available to the families of high-skilled laborers, and an increase in the number of green cards issued by 50,000 a year.The reported deal would also restrict the entrance of migrants who fail to appear at a port of entry, permit the influx of up to 5,000 migrants a day into America, and provide taxpayer-funded legal representation for unaccompanied migrant children and mentally incompetent migrants. Mr. Murphy says he hopes the GOP will get on board with these sweeping reforms. “We do have a bipartisan deal,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday. “We’re working on the text right now and the question is whether Republicans are going to listen to Donald Trump, who wants to preserve the chaos at the border because he thinks that it’s a winning political issue for him, or whether we are going to pass legislation which would be the biggest bipartisan reform of our border and immigration laws in 40 years.”President Trump has been instrumental in trying to kill the deal. Speaker Johnson says he has been speaking with the former president every few days and has now endorsed Mr. Trump’s calls to abandon the deal. On Saturday, Mr. Johnson made it clear that he would not take up the legislation even if it passes through the Senate, saying that 5,000 migrant crossings per day would be a surrender. Messrs. Lankford and Murphy have faced criticism from their respective party members over the deal. Mr. Lankford was praised as a good man by his fellow conservative senators, but those lawmakers — including Senators Lee, Cruz, and Johnson — say the deal would do nothing to secure the border. They also say a 5,000 per day cap is far too high. On the left, Mr. Murphy has been accused of selling out asylum seekers and immigrants so that he can get the Ukraine aid he wants. The chairwoman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Congresswoman Nanette Barragán, said at a press conference that Republicans have resorted to “hostage-taking” in the negotiations so that they can punish migrants fleeing persecution.

Senate Immigration Reform Negotiators Say Legislation Could Come To The Floor as Soon as This Week

Senate Immigration Reform Negotiators Say Legislation Could Come To The Floor as Soon as This Week

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