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      The unprecedented situation at the US-Mexico border – visualized

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      Record levels of migration are straining an immigration system left nearly broken by decades of congressional inaction.Republicans have spent years amplifying scenes of turmoil and tragedy at the southern border, but Democratic leaders are also worried now, particularly big-city mayors and blue state governors who are demanding more federal resources to shelter and feed an influx of migrants.With many voters now saying immigration is a top priority, what exactly is happening at the US border to make so many people concerned?There has been a surge of encounters at the US borderSince the pandemic there has been a spike in global migration, coinciding with Joe Biden’s presidency. Across the globe, people are fleeing war, political insecurity, violence, poverty and natural disasters. Many of those in Latin America, in particular, travel to the US in search of safety.View image in fullscreenIn the last three years, the number of people attempting to cross the US’s southern border into the country has risen to unprecedented levels.In the month of December 2023 alone, border patrol agents recorded 302,000 encounters (these include apprehensions and immediate expulsions), a new high. The monthly average from 2013 to 2019 was 39,000.Arrivals are coming from more countriesThe collapse of Venezuela, political instability in Haiti, violence in Ecuador, a crackdown in Nicaragua, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, repression in China and other conflicts have fueled a historic shift in migration patterns.Mexico was the single most common origin country for US border encounters in 2023, but Mexican nationals made up less than 30% of the total share, compared with more than 60% a decade ago.Their journey is more perilousNearly 9,000 people attempting to reach the US from the south have been recorded missing or dead in the Americas in the past 10 years, according to the Missing Migrants Project.Some never make it through the notorious Darién Gap at the southern end of Central America, where a US deal with Panama and Colombia to stop migrants in their tracks has caused an outcry.The vast majority of recorded fatalities (5,145), however, occur at the US-Mexico border crossing, according to the project’s data.Many of the deaths occurred in southern Arizona when people attempted to cross open desert, miles from any roads.Fatalities are also concentrated along the treacherous stretch of south-western Texas where the Rio Grande river becomes the borderline. Further inland, hundreds of deaths have been recorded in the sparse, humid scrubland around Falfurrias.View image in fullscreenTheir cases languish in courtsThe border rules are complicated: some people apprehended at the border will face expedited deportation, but others will enter formal deportation proceedings and qualify for temporary release into the US, with a date to appear before a judge.Resolving those immigration cases and asylum claims can take years. The backlog of immigration cases has grown steadily – there were an astounding 3.3m cases pending as of December 2023, but just 682 immigration judges. That means the average caseload is more than 4,500 per judge.In the meantime …People arriving often find themselves in unofficial camps all along the US border. Some are waiting to cross, others have been met by US border patrol, yet others have been turned away. Some border states such as Texas have put tens of thousands of people awaiting their asylum claims on buses and sent them to other states, including California and New York, without their knowledge or permission.As for Congress, it continues to argue over clamping down on unlawful border crossings and alleviating the deepening humanitarian crisis – an increasingly irreconcilable divide between those who want to expand the immigration system and those who want to restrict it.View image in fullscreen More

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      House to vote on impeaching Biden’s homeland security secretary

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      House Republicans cleared the way on Tuesday for a vote to impeach the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, as Democrats denounced the move as a purely partisan exercise meant to boost the electoral prospects of Donald Trump.The historic vote, scheduled for early evening, would mark the first time since 1876 that the House has impeached a cabinet official, but with hours to go before a scheduled evening vote its prospects were unclear. But Democrats have retorted that Republicans were abusing the impeachment process to attack one of Joe Biden’s cabinet members during a crucial election year, in which immigration may play a key role.With Republicans in control of the House by a whisker-thin margin, and Democrats uniformly opposed, they can afford only a few defections. Two Republicans have already announced their opposition and a handful more appeared undecided as the House proceeded to debate the charges against Mayorkas.Congressman Ken Buck, a Republican of Colorado who declared himself solidly opposed to the impeachment effort, said the accusations leveled against Mayorkas amounted to a “policy difference”, not an impeachable offense.“If we start going down this path of impeachment with a cabinet official, we are opening a door as Republicans that we don’t want to open,” Buck said on MSNBC shortly before the afternoon vote.Republicans are seeking to impeach Mayorkas on charges that he willfully refused to enforce immigration law and breached the public trust, overriding the objections of legal experts, including some prominent conservatives, who say they have failed to produce compelling evidence that the cabinet secretary had committed high crimes and misdemeanors.“I respect everybody’s view on it,” House speaker Mike Johnson told reporters on Tuesday. “I understand the heavy weight that impeachment is.”He described impeachment as an “extreme measure”, but said that “extreme times call for extreme measures.”During the floor debate on Tuesday, Republicans leveled broad accusations that Mayorkas had mismanaged oversight of the US-Mexico border, where arrests for illegal crossings have reached record highs.“The constituents I represent do not understand why Texas has had to endure basically an invasion during the tenure of the secretary of Homeland Security,” Congressman Michael Burgess, Republican of Texas, said in floor remarks ahead of the procedural vote. “What are we left to do?”A Harvard-Harris survey conducted this month showed that immigration is now an important concern for voters, with 35% of respondents citing the issue as their top priority. But Democrats say that the Republican impeachment effort is a political stunt rather than meaningful reform.“Do we have a problem at the border? Absolutely,” said Democratic congressman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts. But, he said: “It’s clear that this is not about Secretary Mayorkas or a high crime and misdemeanor. It is about a policy disagreement with President Biden.”Trump has made the “crisis” at the border a focus of his presidential campaign and celebrated Republicans for impeaching Mayorkas on very shaky grounds.Meanwhile, Republicans barreled toward a vote as a border deal recently brokered by the Biden administration and a bipartisan group of senators appeared to be on the brink of collapse. After months of painstaking negotiations, Senate Republicans appear ready to oppose the agreement, all but ensuring it will fall short of the 60 votes needed to pass legislation in the chamber.In the event it does pass the Senate, Johnson has described it as an inadequate response to the situation at the border and has declared the deal will be “dead on arrival” in the lower chamber.House Republicans’ opposition to the bipartisan proposal and their support of Mayorkas’s impeachment sparked accusations of hypocrisy among Democrats, who argued their colleagues were uninterested in substantive changes to immigration policy even as they expressed outrage over the situation at the border.The impeachment of Mayorkas has attracted notable criticism from conservatives, including in an op-ed by the Wall Street Journal editorial board that was frequently cited by Democrats on Tuesday.“As much as we share the frustration with the Biden border mess, impeaching Mr Mayorkas won’t change enforcement policy and is a bad precedent that will open the gates to more cabinet impeachments by both parties,” the board wrote in an editorial published on Tuesday. “Grandstanding is easier than governing, and Republicans have to decide whether to accomplish anything other than impeaching Democrats.” More

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      ‘Show a little courage’: Biden attacks Republicans for ‘caving’ to Trump on US-Mexico border security bill

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      Joe Biden urged Congress to pass the bipartisan border bill in a pointed speech on Tuesday, accusing Republicans of “caving” in to Donald Trump’s demands to block the legislation from advancing.“All indications are this bill won’t even move forward to the Senate floor. Why? A simple reason: Donald Trump. Because Donald Trump thinks it’s bad for him politically,” Biden said at the White House. “He’d rather weaponize this issue than actually solve it.”With an eye toward the presidential race, Trump has attacked the bipartisan deal on Truth Social as “nothing more than a highly sophisticated trap for Republicans to assume the blame on what the Radical Left Democrats have done to our Border, just in time for our most important EVER Election”.As of Tuesday afternoon, it appeared that more than 20 Republican senators were prepared to oppose the border bill, raising serious doubts about its passage.In his speech, Biden pledged he would make sure that Republicans received the blame if the bill does not pass, indicating he would spotlight the issue on the campaign trail.“The American people are going to know why it failed. I’ll be taking this issue to the country,” Biden said. “Every day between now and November, the American people are going to know that the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump and his Maga [‘Make America Great Again’] Republican friends. It’s time for Republicans in the Congress to show a little courage, to show a little spine, to make it clear to the American people that you work for them – not for anyone else.”Biden’s remarks came one day before the Senate is expected to hold a procedural vote on advancing the border bill, which will require 60 “yes” votes to receive approval. But even the bill’s greatest proponents have expressed doubts that it can advance.“I would anticipate Wednesday, the cloture vote does not pass,” Senator James Lankford, a Republican of Oklahoma who helped broker the deal, told reporters after a conference meeting on Monday. “People are saying, ‘Hey, I need a lot more time to be able to go through this.’”A number of senators have already indicated they will not support the bill. Hard-right Republicans argue that it does not go far enough to address the situation at the US-Mexican border, where arrests for illegal crossings have hit record highs.“The border deal is even worse than we thought,” Senator Mike Lee, a Republican of Utah, said on Sunday. “No one who cares about our border security should support it. It is a betrayal of the American people.”But progressive Democrats insist the bill, which has been described as the most severe set of changes to border policy in decades, is far too restrictive. Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat of California and chair of the Senate judiciary subcommittee on immigration, citizenship and border safety, said on Monday that the bill amounted to “dismantling our asylum system while ultimately failing to alleviate the challenges at our border”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe $118bn bill would grant the president a new power to shut down the border when daily crossings pass a certain limit while also expediting the asylum review process, which could lead to a quicker deportation for many migrants. The bill would also provide $60bn in military assistance for Ukraine, $14bn in security assistance for Israel, and $10bn in humanitarian assistance for civilians affected by war in Ukraine, Gaza and the West Bank.Supporters of the bill have framed the legislation as vital for those US allies abroad, warning colleagues that inaction could trigger disastrous consequences around the world.“If we fail the Ukrainian people, then Vladimir Putin will likely succeed in his invasion of Ukraine. Putin will be emboldened, and western democracy will face the greatest threat it has seen in decades,” the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, a Democrat of New York, said on Monday.But that argument has failed to sway the bill’s Republican critics, many of whom already oppose sending more money to Ukraine. Meanwhile, the House speaker, Republican Mike Johnson of Louisiana, is moving forward on Tuesday with a planned vote on a standalone bill to provide aid to Israel, but Biden has already threatened to veto that proposal.“It’s time to stop playing games with the world waiting and watching. And by the way, the world is waiting. The world is watching,” Biden said on Tuesday. “They are waiting to watch what we’re going to do. We cannot we can’t continue to let petty partisan politics get in the way of responsibility. More

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      Joe Biden blames Trump for expected blocking of immigration bill – video

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      President Joe Biden accused Republicans of giving in to Trump’s ‘threats’ and opposing a bill to tighten immigration policy, which the party had demanded. The $118bn package would pair federal enforcement policy on the US-Mexico border with wartime aid for Ukraine, Israel and others, overhauling the asylum system with tougher enforcement and giving presidents new powers to expel migrants if border authorities deem themselves overwhelmed by the number of people requesting asylum. In his speech at the White House, Biden said the bill would help the country, but because it would not aid Trump’s bid for presidency, it wold not make it to the Senate floor to be debated More

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      Republican congressmen are now talking about throwing migrants from helicopters | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      Three years ago, the Intercept published an illuminating article about the rise of the “Hoppean snake” among far-right extremists, a meme which the Intercept labelled especially “disturbing for its frightening historical reference”. For the uninitiated, the Hoppean Snake in its various forms usually depicts a serpent wearing the military hat of the American-backed Chilean dictator Gen Augusto Pinochet in the foreground while figures are dropping out of helicopters to their death in the background.The meme specifically refers to Pinochet’s known strategy of kidnapping, torturing, killing, and – here’s the point – throwing his political opponents out of helicopters and into the ocean to dispose of them. The Intercept noted that many groups and individuals on the far right, such as the “Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, armed Trumpists, and the like wear T-shirts that offer ‘free helicopter rides’.” and when they do so, “they are referencing a program of extermination.”It’s alarming to see such rhetoric from the far-right fringes; imagine seeing this kind of political violence being advocated by a sitting politician or someone seeking the highest office in the land.Well, you don’t have to imagine it any more. Last week, the Republican congressman Mike Collins of Georgia did just that. On Twitter/X,, Collins commented on a widely circulated picture of Jhoan Boada, a man who was recently arrested for allegedly assaulting two police officers in New York City outside a migrant shelter.Boada was one of seven men arrested, and multiple reports refer to him as a “migrant”. After leaving court, Boada was photographed raising his two middle fingers to reporters as he walked away. The picture prompted Republican congressman Anthony D’Esposito of New York to offer the racist riposte: “We feel the same way about you. Holla at the cartels and have them escort you back.”Collins then joined in. “Or we could buy him a ticket on Pinochet Air for a free helicopter ride back,” he wrote.As HuffPost’s Christopher Mathias, who covers the far right, put it on X: “So we have a congressman joking or not joking about extrajudicially executing a migrant arrested for a crime (allegedly assaulting a cop) that tons of non-migrant citizens get arrested for too.” Mathias also notes that the “free helicopter ride” meme has been popular with white supremacists and neo-fascists for about the last seven years.That such rhetoric is dangerous to human life and damaging to our political culture is hardly difficult to fathom. Collins was even briefly suspended from X for violating its rules against violent speech, which considering the bevy of white supremacists and neofascists on that site is quite an accomplishment. (“Never delete. Never surrender,” he posted, after his account was reinstated.) But Collins was hardly the only American political figure recently promoting political assassination.Lawyers for Donald Trump told a federal appeals court last month that a president would basically be immune from prosecution if the president ordered “Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival”, as a judge asked. Trump’s legal team argued that the president “would have to be impeached and convicted” before any prosecution could proceed. The New York Times called the argument “jaw-dropping”. The New Yorker wrote that we should all be worried, not because of Trump but because of how unsettled the law actually is.Rightwing disdain for everyone but themselves fuels this authoritarian thinking, and it is readily found in the writing of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, the German American academic to whom the Hoppean snake refers. (When contacted by the Intercept in 2021 about the meme, Hoppe said: “What do I know? There are lots of crazy people out there!”) In his 2001 book Democracy: The God That Failed, the libertarian Hoppe writes that: “there can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society.”Expulsion is also necessary, Hoppe argues, for “the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism”.Meanwhile, far-right groups assembled this past weekend in a convoy for a “Take Back Our Border” rally in Eagle Pass, Texas. Near this border town is the standoff between the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, and the federal government, after Abbott installed razor wire along the border and denied federal border patrol agents access to the area. Three people, a woman and two children, drowned after the razor wire was installed, and the supreme court ruled recently that the federal government could remove the razor wire. After the ruling was issued, Representative Mike Collins introduced legislation banning the government from removing the wire.Appearing at the “Take Back Our Border” rally was the rightwing journalist Michael Yon, who offered a tirade about how the US border has become insecure because of the funders of immigration to the United States. Among his targets was HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which he described as “Jewish, right?” He continued: “This is quite interesting because [HIAS] are actually funding the people who are going to come to places like Fort Lauderdale, synagogues, and they’re going to scream ‘Allahu Akbar’ and they’re going to shoot the shit out of them. Right? And they’re coming across the border, and it’s being funded with Jewish money.”In reality, HIAS’s work aiding immigrant Muslims and Latinos so terrified the white supremacist Robert Bowers that he – not a Muslim yelling Allahu Akbar – subsequently shot and killed 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the deadliest attack on Jewish people in US history. But why let facts get in the way of a good racist screed?Jews, Muslims, immigrants – everything is a threat. Violence is the solution. Opponents should be assassinated. Fascists are role models. Welcome to the Republican party in the year 2024.
      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      US Senate releases draft bill to toughen border measures while securing aid to Ukraine and Israel

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      US senators on Sunday evening released the details of a highly anticipated $118bn package that pairs federal enforcement policy on the US-Mexico border with wartime aid for Ukraine, Israel and others, launching a long-shot effort to push the bill past sceptical, hard right House Republicans – whom Democrats accuse of politicizing immigration while being in thrall to Donald Trump.The proposal is the best chance for Joe Biden to bolster dwindling US wartime aid for Ukraine – a major foreign policy goal that is shared by both the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, and top Republican, Mitch McConnell. The Senate was expected this week to hold a key test vote on the legislation, but it faces a wall of opposition from conservatives.Joe Biden urged the US Congress to pass the legislation, for the sake of immigration reform and aid for US allies.The bill “includes the toughest and fairest set of border reforms in decades,” he said in a statement issued by the White House.He added: “Now, House Republicans have to decide. Do they want to solve the problem? Or do they want to keep playing politics with the border? I’ve made my decision. I’m ready to solve the problem.”Crucially, with Congress stalled on approving $60bn in Ukraine aid, the US has halted shipments of ammunition and missiles to Kyiv, leaving Ukrainian soldiers outgunned as they try to come out on top of a grinding stalemate with Russian troops.“The United States and our allies are facing multiple, complex and, in places, coordinated challenges from adversaries who seek to disrupt democracy and expand authoritarian influence around the globe,” Schumer said in a statement.In a bid to overcome opposition from House Republicans, McConnell had insisted last year that border policy changes be included in the national security funding package.The bill would overhaul the asylum system at the border with faster and tougher enforcement, as well as give presidents new powers to immediately expel migrants if authorities deemed themselves overwhelmed with the number of undocumented people requesting asylum at the international boundary.The tough new measures discussed among select senators for months include a new federal requirement to “shut down” the US-Mexico border if more than 5,000 undocumented people cross into the US daily and plans to swiftly throw out economic migrants.Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who broke from the Democratic party in 2022 to become an independent, told CBS’s Face the Nation earlier on Sunday some of what she and other Senate negotiators have been working on.When the number of migrants crossing without an appointment with the US authorities approaches 4,000 people a day, the US government would be granted the power to voluntarily turn away all people presenting at border stations, to give time for the asylum application processing to catch up, she said.At other times, migrants would be taken into short-term detention as their claims for asylum were rapidly assessed. Anyone failing to meet the standards for a claim would be “swiftly returned to their home country”, Sinema said.“We believe that by quickly implementing this system, individuals who come for economic reasons will learn very quickly that this is not a path to enter our country and will not take the sometimes dangerous or treacherous trek to our border,” she told the Sunday morning TV show.Alongside the faster deportation provisions, the draft bill would also speed up the time needed to process successful asylum applications. “Folks who do qualify for asylum will be on a rapid path, six months or less, to start a new life in America,” Sinema said.The draft Senate bill meets several of the demands that have been raised by Republicans who have accused the Biden administration of failing to secure the US border. In particular, it proposes an end to the system of allowing people to remain in the US while their asylum applications are processed – a procedure Republicans dismissively call “catch and release”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs many as 10,000 migrants a day have been encountered crossing the US-Mexico border without necessary immigration papers or an appointment with the US authorities.But the Senate bill is likely to be blocked by Republican leaders in the US House who are following Donald Trump’s lead and opposing the deal. The former president, who is running for re-election, has made it clear that he does not want to see Biden presented with a legislative win on the border crisis.Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, has said the Senate bill would be “dead on arrival” were it to reach his chamber. On Saturday he also made a pre-emptive move that could further imperil the chances of the Senate bill ever becoming law by announcing that he would bring to a vote on the House floor a separate $17.6bn military aid package for Israel.Johnson was asked by NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday whether his aid for Israel plan was a ruse to kill the Senate compromise deal on the border. He was also asked whether he was merely doing Trump’s bidding, with Trump “calling the shots”.“Of course not,” the speaker said. “He’s not calling the shots, I am calling the shots for the House – that’s our responsibility.”Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader in the House, derided House Republicans, in interview on the ABC US network’s This Week Sunday show, as “wholly owned subsidiaries of Donald Trump”.With the numbers of migrants turning up at the border remaining high, and with the presidential election year getting under way, immigration is set to continue to cause ructions on both sides of the political aisle.On Sunday Nikki Haley, Trump’s only remaining rival in the race to secure the Republican nomination, accused Trump in a CNN interview of “playing politics” with the border with his attempt to scupper the Senate deal.The Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Texas’s ‘states’ rights’ argument in the border dispute sets a dangerous precedent

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      Over the past few weeks, a quiet legal crisis has been unfolding on the US-Mexico border. Texas has seized control of part of the border and claimed the right to prevent federal authorities from exercising jurisdiction there. After the US supreme court ruled that the federal government could tear down razor wire erected by Texas authorities, the state vowed to erect more – and Governor Greg Abbott claimed that because the federal government had failed to protect his state from an “invasion” of refugees, it has “broken the compact between the United States and the States” and lost the right to exercise authority over the border altogether.To understand why this is so alarming, you need to see it in two historical contexts. The first is the notion of a “compact” between the states. This idea holds that the constitution is not the supreme law of the land but rather a mere agreement between independently sovereign states. Those states hence retain the right to decide when certain actions by the federal government break the compact – and to reclaim their independence accordingly.This idea – sometimes known as “compact theory” – was key to the quasi-legal arguments deployed by the Confederate states in the 19th century to justify first secession, and then civil war. As well as being rejected by the framers of the constitution, it was also explicitly ruled incorrect by the supreme court once the civil war was over. Nowadays, there is really no such thing as “compact theory” outside of the imagination of neo-Confederates and other far-right groups – there’s just federal law, and actions that break that law.Secondly, the erroneous idea of the compact and the broader agenda of “states’ rights” of which it is a part have often been deployed in order to advance a white supremacist agenda. Slavery is the most notable example. But the southern states – including Texas – also invoked these ideas to defend the system of Jim Crow, which within living memory denied full rights to generations of African Americans. Only the civil rights movement forced a change.Another part of this tradition is the inversion of the realities of power and violence which lie at its heart. Slavery was justified in part by arguments that the slaves, if freed, would threaten and even exterminate the white race. Jim Crow was reinforced by the related idea that free Black people would, if not physically eradicate white people, destroy the white body politic by contaminating it with unfit citizens. In each case the reality of who was really a threat to whom – the slavedriver to the slave, the Klansman to the free Black citizen – was hidden by an elaborate ideology of fear which in reality was used to justify the continuation of white supremacy.By claiming the right to nullify federal authority in order to wield lethal force against non-white migrants, Abbott is placing himself squarely in the center of these two traditions. His actions have already contributed to the death of two children and a mother who drowned in the Rio Grande as Texas authorities prevented federal agents from coming to their aid. Refugees are among the most powerless people in the world, but to Abbott they are elements of an “invading” force which threatens the security of Texas and the United States. Like his predecessors, he believes that even the constitution shouldn’t stand in the way of his ability to harm them.But just because Abbott is invoking some of the most sordid chapters in American history to justify his actions doesn’t mean we should have confidence that he will fail.One of the most disturbing aspects of this whole affair is that despite Abbott’s arguments having no legal merit, four supreme court justices were willing to endorse Texas blocking federal authorities from removing the razor wire at the border. The fact that this case was so narrowly decided is a five-alarm fire that suggests we are only one new court decision or one new Republican supreme court appointment away from a radical restructuring of America’s constitutional order. Future historians may look back on the 2020s as a turning point as profound as the civil rights movement of the 1960s – and one in which the pendulum swung back the other way.What Texas is doing also dramatically raises the stakes of this year’s presidential election – and not just because the next president may be able to pick another supreme court justice. With so many Republicans endorsing the idea that the situation at the border can be characterized as an invasion, the road seems to be open for a Republican president to make a federal invasion declaration.This would not only pave the way for an even more militarized treatment of refugees, but also allow the federal government to suspend the rights of millions of Americans living in border areas if it deems such a step necessary to repel the supposed attack.Luckily, there are legal and institutional barriers to such a step – many constitutional scholars believe that a federal invasion declaration requires an act of Congress. But in this case as in others, all roads lead to the supreme court, and it has already signaled its openness to many extreme ideas. America is in a time of great constitutional danger, and the border may be both an early warning sign – and the place where the country ultimately comes unstuck.
      Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United States at Leiden University. He writes a newsletter called America Explained More

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      Senate to vote next week on bipartisan border bill, Schumer says

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      The US Senate will vote next week on a bipartisan bill that would strengthen security at the US-Mexico border and also provide more aid to Ukraine and Israel, the chamber’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, said on Thursday.“We cannot simply shirk from our responsibilities just because the task is difficult,” Schumer said on the Senate floor, adding that the text of the package will be released by Sunday, with the initial vote taking place no later than Wednesday.Senate negotiators have been in talks over the package for months. Donald Trump, who is seeking re-election to the White House and is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, has urged lawmakers to reject the deal.The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, has also voiced skepticism about the talks, saying that if it emerged from the Senate the bipartisan legislation would be “dead on arrival” in the GOP-controlled House.A bipartisan group of senators have for weeks been looking for an agreement to implement stricter immigration policies and stop undocumented migrants at the southern border with Mexico. Numbers have fluctuated during Joe Biden’s presidency but are currently at record levels.Republicans have named passing the legislation as their price for approving aid to Ukraine, whose cause rightwing lawmakers have soured on as the war has dragged on and as Donald Trump, who has been ambivalent about sending arms to Kyiv, draws closer to winning the Republican presidential nomination.Congresses and presidents since the days of George W Bush have tried and failed to reform the US’s system for admitting workers and immigrants, including screening undocumented migrants and asylum seekers.The long odds of the latest negotiations succeeding were underscored last week when the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, told his lawmakers that because Trump wanted to campaign on immigration reform, he doubted that the party would support any agreement that emerges from the talks. Biden is suffering at the polls on economic factors but also on conservative voters calling for greater security at the border.Senators from both parties expressed outrage over Trump’s apparent and sudden influence after almost daily talks. Chris Murphy, the main Democratic negotiator in the talks, said: “I hope we don’t live in a world today in which one person inside the Republican party holds so much power that they could stop a bipartisan bill to try to give the president additional power at the border to make more sense of our immigration policy.”The following day, Politico reported that McConnell had changed his tone, telling Republicans in a meeting that he still supported the talks.Now Schumer has signaled that the bill may be ready in the Senate. Details of what is in the legislation have not been disclosed.Meanwhile, the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, who has been involved in the talks, is facing a rare impeachment of a cabinet member by the House, over his handling of the southern border.Reuters contributed reporting More