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      Republicans make wild claims about the dangers of immigration. Here’s the truth | Robert Reich

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      Trumpist Republicans are using the surge of illegal immigration at the southern border of the US, as well as a surge of migrants seeking legal asylum, to threaten a government shutdown and no added funds for Ukraine.They’re using five lies to make their case.1. They claim Biden doesn’t want to stem illegal immigration and has created an “open border”.Rubbish. Since he took office, Biden has consistently asked for additional funding for border control.Republicans have just as consistently refused. They’re voting to cut Customs and Border Protection funding in spending bills and blocking passage of Biden’s $106bn national security supplemental that includes border funding.2. They blame the drug crisis on illegal immigration.Last Wednesday, at the southern border in Texas, the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, claimed that “America is at a breaking point with record levels of illegal immigration. We have lethal drugs that are pouring into our country at record levels.”Rubbish. While large amounts of fentanyl and other deadly drugs have been flowing into the United States from Mexico, 90% arrives through official ports of entry, not via immigrants illegally crossing the border. In fact, research by the Cato Institute found that more than 86% of the people convicted of trafficking fentanyl across the border in 2021 were US citizens.3. They claim that undocumented immigrants are terrorists.Johnson also charged that “312 suspects on the terrorist watch list that have been apprehended – we have no idea how many terrorists have come into the country and set up terrorism cells across the nation.”Baloney. America’s southern border has not been an entry point for terrorists. For almost a half century, no American has been killed or injured in a terrorist attack in the United States that involved someone who crossed the border illegally.Johnson’s number comes from government data showing that from October 2020 to November 2023, 312 migrants – out of more than 6.2 million who crossed the southern border during these years – matched names on the terrorist watch list.It’s unclear how many were actual matches and whether the FBI considered them national security threats (the watch list includes family relations of terrorist suspects, many of whom are not considered to be involved in terrorist activity).4. They say undocumented immigrants are stealing American jobs.Nonsense. Evidence shows immigrants are not taking jobs that American workers want.And the surge across the border is not increasing unemployment. Far from it: unemployment has been below 4% for roughly two years, far lower than the long-term average rate of 5.71%. It’s now at 3.7%.5. They claim undocumented immigrants are responsible for more crime in the US.More baloney. In fact, a 2020 study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, cited by the Department of Justice, showed that undocumented immigrants have “substantially” lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants.Similarly, a recently published study in the American Economic Journal – analyzing official data from 2008 to 2017 on immigration, homicide and victimization surveys – found “null effects” on crime from immigration.Notwithstanding the recent surge in illegal immigration, the US homicide rate has fallen nearly 13% since 2022 – the largest decrease on record. Local law enforcement agencies are also reporting drops in violent crime.Who’s really behind these lies?Since he entered politics, Donald Trump has fanned nativist fears and bigotry.He’s now moving into full-throttled neofascism, using the actual rhetoric of Hitler to attack immigrants – charging that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and saying they’re “like a military invasion. Drugs, criminals, gang members and terrorists are pouring into our country at record levels. We’ve never seen anything like it. They’re taking over our cities.”He promises to use the US military to round up undocumented immigrants and put them into “camps”. That demagoguery is being echoed by Trump lackeys to generate fear and put Biden on the defensive.Does the US need to address the border situation? Yes – which Biden is trying to do. But we need to do so in a way that treats migrants as humans, not political pawns.Trump and his enablers want Americans to forget that almost all of us are the descendants of immigrants who fled persecution, or were brought to the US under duress, or simply sought better lives for themselves and their descendants.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      House Republicans move forward to impeach homeland security head

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      House Republicans barreled ahead with their effort to impeach the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, for his handling of the US’s southern border, as their party attempts to make immigration a defining issue of this year’s presidential election.The House homeland security committee launched the impeachment proceedings on Wednesday, with Republicans charging that Mayorkas has been derelict in his duty to secure the US-Mexico border amid a sharp rise in migration while Democrats and administration officials assailed the inquiry as a “sham” and a “political stunt”.“This is not a legitimate impeachment,” said Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the panel. Echoing constitutional experts and conservative legal scholars, Thompson added: “You cannot impeach a cabinet secretary because you don’t like a president’s policy.”At Wednesday’s hearing, titled Havoc in the Heartland: How Secretary Mayorkas’ Failed Leadership Has Impacted the States, the panel’s chairman, Representative Mark Green, Republican of Tennessee, declared that he had a “duty” to pursue impeachment against Mayorkas, arguing in a combative closing statement that it was the appropriate punishment for the secretary’s “piss-poor performance” controlling the flow of migration and drugs into the US.He charged that Mayorkas, a former federal prosecutor, had “brazenly refused to enforce the laws passed by Congress” and has “enacted policies that knowingly make our country less safe”. As a result, Green said, Republicans were left with “no reasonable alternative than to pursue the possibility of impeachment”.The investigation into Mayorkas’s handling of the nation’s borders is being led by the House homeland security committee, as opposed to the House judiciary committee, which typically oversees impeachment proceedings but is presently consumed by Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden.If Republicans are successful, Mayorkas would be the first cabinet secretary impeached in nearly 150 years.Yet across the Capitol, Mayorkas has emerged as a central figure in the bipartisan Senate negotiations over how to respond to the rise in migration at the US border with Mexico. It creates an odd juxtaposition in which House Republicans are trying to impeach an official with whom Senate Republicans are working to try to strike a border security deal.Record numbers of people are arriving at the southern US border each day, though crossings have recently fallen. The influx, as many as 10,000 arrivals on peak days, has strained border patrol resources as well as the public services in many cities and towns across the country.The situation at the US-Mexico border is an acute political vulnerability for the president, who has been unable to stem the flow of people from across the western hemisphere traveling north to escape violence, political upheaval, poverty and natural disasters.Unease among some House Republicans over their effort to impeach Biden despite a failure to uncover any evidence of misconduct has appeared to only strengthen the party’s appetite for bringing articles of impeachment against Mayorkas.In November, shortly after Republicans elected Mike Johnson as their new speaker after the ouster of Kevin McCarthy, far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia attempted to force a snap impeachment of Mayorkas. Eight House Republicans joined with Democrats to block the effort, instead sending her resolution to the House homeland security committee.Now, as the problems at the border deepen and polling shows Republicans with a clear advantage on the issue of immigration and border security, some of those Republicans appear newly willing to support the impeachment effort.Green has indicated that he hopes to move quickly with the impeachment proceedings. But with their razor-thin majority, House Republicans would need near-total unanimity to levy articles of impeachment against Mayorkas.If the House impeaches Mayorkas, it is extremely unlikely two-thirds of the Senate, narrowly controlled by Democrats, would vote to convict him.Austin Knudsen, one of three Republican state attorneys general who testified before the panel on Wednesday, said Montana was on the frontline of the fentanyl crisis, accusing the Biden administration’s border policies of having “poured gasoline on this fire”.Knudsen, along with Gentner Drummond of Oklahoma and Andrew Bailey of Missouri heralded the hardline enforcement actions taken by Donald Trump and blamed the current challenges on Biden’s decisions to stop future construction of his predecessor’s border wall and end of Covid-19 era policy to swiftly expel migrants. (Several miles of the border wall have been built since Biden took office.) Trump, the Republican frontrunner for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination, has vowed even more draconian measures if he is elected to a second term.In her line of questioning on Wednesday, Greene, who sits on the homeland security panel, asked each Republican witness if he believed Mayorkas should be impeached. They agreed unequivocally that he should be.Representative Dan Goldman, a Democrat of New York who was the lead counsel in Trump’s first impeachment, scoffed at their determination, arguing that the attorneys general were not experts on the matter of impeachment and all had joined a lawsuit suing the Biden administration over its border policies.“We have Republicans suing Secretary Mayorkas to stop him from implementing his policy to address the issues at the border. And now we’re going to impeach him because you say he’s not addressing the issues at the border,” Goldman said. “Which do you want?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFrank Bowman, a professor at the University of Missouri school of law and author of the book High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump who counts Bailey, the Missouri attorney general, as a former student, was the lone voice of dissent on the panel. He argued that Mayorkas’s conduct did not rise to level of “high crimes and misdemeanors”, far from it.“If the members of the committee disapprove of the Biden administration’s immigration and border policies, the constitution gives this Congress a wealth of legislative powers to change them,” he said. “Impeachment is not one of them.”During the hearing, Democrats readily acknowledged the challenges at the border, but said impeaching Mayorkas was not the solution. They implored Republicans to work with them to overhaul the nation’s outdated immigration system, expand work permits and increase funding for border agents.Representative Delia Ramirez, a Democrat of Illinois, said it was Republicans, not Democrats, who were failing to take the “humanitarian crisis within our borders seriously”.“Impeachment will not make our borders any safer for our communities or for asylum-seekers and it will not address the conditions across Latin America that motivate families to migrate across the jungles and deserts to our southern border,” she said.Several conservative lawmakers are unhappy with the direction of the bipartisan Senate talks, demanding Congress go further to restrict asylum laws. Some are threatening to block a funding bill and risk a government shutdown if Congress fails to take up Republicans’ hardline border security demands.Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a Republican of New York who represents a district carried by Biden in 2020, was emphatic that the proceedings were about accountability and not political theater. He cited comments by the Democratic leaders in his state who have pleaded for more federal help to deal with the migrant crisis in New York.“This isn’t a narrative,” he said. “It’s not one created by Republicans.”In a memo released ahead of the hearing, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) slammed the proceedings as a “baseless political attack” and a distraction from the efforts underway to find “real solutions” to fix the nation’s beleaguered immigration system.The agency highlighted comments made by Republican lawmakers and conservative legal scholars who disagreed that Mayorkas had committed impeachable offenses.And contrary to Republican claims of an “open” border, the DHS memo said that agents had removed or expelled more than 1 million individuals encountered at the border in both fiscal years 2022 and 2023, with more removals in 2022 than any previous year. It estimated that the annual rate of apprehensions under the Biden administration was 78%, “identical” to the rate under the Trump administration.They also noted increased efforts in stopping the flow of fentanyl, noting that the agency has “stopped more fentanyl and arrested more individuals for fentanyl-related crimes in the last two years than in the previous five years combined”.“This unprecedented process, led by extremists, is harmful to the Department and its workforce and undercuts vital work across countless national security priorities,” the memo said. “Unlike like those pursuing photo ops and politics, Secretary Mayorkas is working relentlessly to fix the problem by working with Republican and Democratic Senators to find common ground and real solutions.” More

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      House Republicans to seek to impeach US homeland security secretary

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      US House Republicans will seek to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, Joe Biden’s secretary of homeland security, alleging “egregious misconduct and refusal to enforce the law” in relation to immigration policy and the southern border.In a statement to CNN on Wednesday, a spokesperson said the House homeland security committee had conducted “a comprehensive investigation into Secretary Mayorkas’s handling of, and role in, the unprecedented crisis at the south-west border.“Following the bipartisan vote in the House to refer articles of impeachment against the secretary to our committee, we will be conducting hearings and taking up those articles in the coming weeks.”A spokesperson told Reuters the first hearing would be next Wednesday, 10 January.In November, a resolution to impeach Mayorkas was blocked, and referred to the committee, when eight Republicans sided with Democrats against a measure introduced by Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Trump supporter from Georgia.Conditions at the border with Mexico have worsened and Biden officials acknowledge a backlog of 3m asylum cases. Seeking draconian reforms, Republicans have made the issue central to talks over federal government funding and aid to Ukraine.On Wednesday, the House Republican spokesperson told CNN impeachment would “ensure that the public is aware of the scope of Secretary Mayorkas’s egregious misconduct and refusal to enforce the law”.In return, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson accused Republicans of “wasting valuable time and taxpayer dollars pursuing a baseless political exercise that has been rejected by members of both parties and already failed on a bipartisan vote.“There is no valid basis to impeach Secretary Mayorkas, as senior members of the House majority have attested, and this extreme impeachment push is a harmful distraction from our critical national security priorities.”Mayorkas told NBC he would “most certainly” cooperate with impeachment proceedings, adding: “And I’m going to continue to do my work, as well.”That work, he said, involved “join[ing] the bipartisan group of senators to work on a legislative solution to a broken immigration system. I was on the Hill yesterday to provide technical advice in those ongoing negotiations. Before I headed to the Hill, I was in the office working on solutions. After my visit to the Hill, I was back in my office, working on solutions.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSpeaking to CNN, Mayorkas said his department did not have the resources to “perform our jobs as fully and completely as we could”.“We need additional personnel to advance our security at the border. We need technology to advance our fight against fentanyl [coming into the US]. We need additional asylum officers to really accelerate the asylum adjudication process.”The House speaker, Mike Johnson, was due on Wednesday to visit the border as part of a 60-strong Republican delegation. The visit underlined the political nature of immigration battles in a presidential election year.The deputy White House press secretary, Andrew Bates, said: “After voting in 2023 to eliminate over 2,000 border patrol agents and erode our capacity to seize fentanyl, House Republicans left Washington in mid-December even as President Biden and Republicans and Democrats in the Senate remained to forge ahead on a bipartisan agreement.”House Republicans, Bates added, had “obstructed [Biden’s] reform proposal and consistently voted against his unprecedented border security funding year after year, hamstringing our border security in the name of extreme, partisan demands”. More

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      US-Mexico border crossings in December set monthly record high

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      More than 300,000 people were on track to cross the US-Mexico border in December without authorization and are being processed by American immigration officials, a tally that sets the latest monthly record, according to government figures obtained by CBS.The number of crossings, averaging roughly 8,400 apprehensions a day by US border agents, comes amid urgent efforts by the Joe Biden White House to curb migrant flows that have become a domestic political liability for him as he seeks re-election in 2024.In the first 28 days of December, border agents processed nearly 235,000 people without permission crossed the southern border in between ports of entry, alongside 50,000 who entered the country under an appointment system. Included in that number were nearly 96,000 parents traveling together with their children.The previous monthly high in US-Mexico border crossings was in September, when the agency processed nearly 270,000.Earlier in December, the White House had hinted it may accept new limits on asylum seekers as well as an expansion of detention and deportation efforts – a potential reversal of immigration liberalizations announced early in Biden’s presidency.Mexico and Venezuela on Saturday announced that they had restarted repatriation flights of Venezuelans migrants in Mexico. That comes after a high-level meeting between US and Mexico officials aimed at curbing the flow while maintaining cross-border trade.Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador said last week that he had received a request from Biden to discuss the issue. “He was worried about the situation on the border because of the unprecedented number of migrants arriving at the border,” López Obrador later said, according to the Associated Press. “He called me, saying we had to look for a solution together.”A recent CBS poll found that immigration ranks second among concerns facing the country, behind inflation but ahead of concerns about the stability of the democratic system.According to government figures, most people who entered the US without permission are released with court notices, without any asylum screenings. The immigration court system, with fewer than 800 immigration judges, has a backlog of 3m pending cases – or 4,500 for each judge, and it may take three years to clear.A caravan of about 6,000 people was reportedly making its way north through Mexico toward the US, placing additional pressure on authorities. On Sunday’s political talkshows, the mayors of Chicago and Denver described the burden that the backlog of immigration cases was placing on their cities.Republican US senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told CBS’s Face the Nation that “expedited removal [of migrants] is on the table” amid negotiations with Democrats for approval of an aid deal for Ukraine. Graham said he looks “at the border problems as a national security nightmare for America”.Later, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat, told CBS: “This is clearly an international and federal crisis that local governments are being asked to subsidize, and this is clearly unsustainable.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe mayor placed blame on Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, whose administration is sending planes and buses of migrants to northern cities. Abbott, he said, “is determined to continue to sow seeds of chaos”.In the same conversation, the Denver mayor, Mike Johnston, said his city had received 35,000 migrants in December who had been successfully integrated. “What we don’t want is people arriving at two in the morning at a city and [at] county buildings with women and children outside in 10-degree weather and no support,” he said.Ohio congressman Mike Turner, chairman of the US House intelligence committee, told ABC’s This Week that White House action on the issue would have to come before he and his fellow Republicans moved on administration requests on Congress to approve a national security package that includes aid for Ukraine and Israel in their respective ongoing wars.“We have cities across the country who are having … huge impacts, who are calling on the administration to address it,” Turner added. More

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      Biden officials decry Trump’s anti-migrant xenophobia – yet quietly copy his stance| Moustafa Bayoumi

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      At a campaign rally in New Hampshire last Saturday, the former president Donald Trump repeated a claim he made back in September: immigrants coming to the United States, he said, are “poisoning the blood of our country”. The phrase is particularly disturbing as it evokes Nazi language about blood and nation.The last time Trump uttered this “poisoning the blood of our country” phrase, criticism from historians and civil libertarians was swift. This time, Joe Biden’s re-election campaign saw an opportunity and pounced. “Donald Trump channeled his role models as he parroted Adolf Hitler,” a Biden-Harris 2024 spokesperson wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, adding that “Trump is not shying away from his promise to lock up millions of people in detention camps.”Yes, that’s true, but while Trump’s rhetoric and promises are odious and must be rejected, the Biden campaign is also talking out of both sides of its mouth.First, to Trump. By now, only a visitor from another planet (who would certainly be locked up by Trump for illegal entry) would be surprised by the ex-president’s rhetoric. Trump’s jingoistic ability to sow fear of foreigners and hatred of others is a large part of his rightwing populist appeal. Over the weekend, Trump also claimed that “drugs, criminals, gang members and terrorists are pouring into our country”. He said the United States was facing something “like a military invasion” from would-be immigrants and asylum seekers and promised to implement “the largest deportation operation in American history”.Even the cadence of his speech is reminiscent of a reel highlighting the Greatest Worst Things Trump Ever Said. Remember what he said about Mexico in 2015? “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”Today, even the “good people” are gone. Now, Trump describes those crossing the border this way: “They come from prisons. They come from mental institutions and insane asylums. Many are terrorists.” (It’s a 2024 remix!) He also makes a point to say: “They’re coming from all over the world. They’re coming from Africa, from Asia,” as if we should be afraid of Latinos, Africans and Asians, leaving me to wonder whom we shouldn’t be afraid of. I’m not really wondering. The answer is as plain as vanilla.But far more troubling than Trump’s putrid but predictable xenophobia is hearing the Biden campaign trumpet how morally opposed it is to Trump’s border policies at precisely the same time that the White House is negotiating with Republicans to adopt immigration policies that look suspiciously and horribly Trump-like. There is a word for such a stance: hypocrisy.The reason for the negotiations is no secret. The Biden administration has been seeking to send US military assistance to both Ukraine and Israel, but the funding bills have stalled in Congress. To vote for the money, Republicans are demanding the administration overhaul its immigration policy to align more closely with theirs, and – disturbingly – the Democrats seem poised to do so.Put another way, the Democrats are ready sell out immigration for foreign policy, even though the impact on immigration could be substantial and long-lasting, while Democratic foreign policy goals are both unclear and increasingly unpopular.Joe Biden entered office with an immigration reform agenda, one that sought to reverse many of the inhuman positions of his predecessor, such as the family separation policy that the Trump administration cruelly deployed. Biden didn’t always succeed, but the aspiration was clear. Early on in his term, he proposed the US Citizenship Act of 2021, which would have offered a path to citizenship for undocumented people, brought Dreamers – undocumented people brought to the United States as children – immigration relief, set up refugee processing centers in Central America and funded more immigration judges, among other things.It never passed.Instead of convincing the other side of the aisle of the need for immigration reform, the Biden administration has slowly given up on reform over the years. It’s been happening piecemeal for a while now (such as Biden funding the construction of 20 miles of Trump’s border wall), but reports of the latest negotiations read like a major capitulation to the Republican worldview.The Biden administration is reportedly discussing rolling back its historical commitments to asylum seekers in exchange for aid to Ukraine and Israel and inducting a new system to apprehend undocumented immigrants already in the country. Being discussed is expanding “expedited removal” of migrants at the border without a hearing, significantly raising the criteria for asylum, making permanent pandemic-era border restrictions (like the public health provision known as Title 42) and mandating immigration detention for some immigrants who are awaiting a court date.“A return to Trump-era policies is not the fix,” is how Alex Padilla, a Democratic senator from California, has responded. Padilla is the first Latino chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration, citizenship and border safety. “In fact, it will make the problem worse,” he said. “Mass detention, gutting our asylum system, Title 42 on steroids. It is unconscionable.”Trump’s racist comments about “poisoning the blood of the nation” are typical of Trump’s bigotry, but Biden’s immigration approach reads more like a betrayal. Biden’s willingness to trade away American traditions of asylum protection and meaningful immigration reform for an Israeli military campaign on Gaza that is widely acknowledged – even by Biden himself – as unacceptably dangerous to civilian life, having killed upwards of 20,000 people, makes Biden’s calculation here seem not only cynical but disastrous, both for Gaza’s civilians and for Biden’s prospects for re-election. (Meanwhile, why wouldn’t Israel’s leaders continue to ignore Biden’s pleas to limit their military assault? Ignoring Biden makes him look weak, as they too would almost certainly prefer a Trump presidency.)The Biden administration wants to have it both ways. Biden officials want to believe they can criticize Trump’s positions but adopt positions close to Trump’s when it’s expedient. To answer this fundamental contradiction, they seem to be throwing their weight behind the appeal of a “lesser of two evils” argument for Democratic voters.What they don’t seem to realize, or want to acknowledge, is that every time someone asks you to choose between a lesser of two evils, they’re still asking you to choose evil. And that’s a choice some voters simply aren’t willing to make.
      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Biden infuriated by Ukraine impasse but Republicans refuse to bend over border

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      It is an astonishing bit of horse-trading over Ukraine that has left Democrats infuriated, even baffled. After Senate Republicans blocked a supplemental funding package on Wednesday to aid the country in its fight against the Russian invasion, demanding tough new southern border controls in exchange, the chamber’s leading Democrat took to the floor.Calling it “a sad night in the history of the Senate”, Chuck Schumer bemoaned the vote as a disappointing reflection on the country, a step away from letting Vladimir Putin “walk right through Ukraine and right through Europe”.“Republicans just blocked a very much needed proposal to send funding for Ukraine, funding for Israel, humanitarian aid for innocent civilians in Gaza, and funding for the Indo-Pacific,” Schumer said.“If there is a word for what we most need now, it is to be serious.”The 49-51 vote reflected a growing trend in Congress that has become a source of distress for the White House. When Russia first invaded Ukraine in February 2022, aiding Kyiv was a bipartisan project. In May of that year, a $40bn Ukraine aid package sailed through the House with a vote of 368-57, and the Senate with a vote of 86 -11.But as the war has stretched on, more Republican lawmakers have turned against aid to Ukraine, embracing Donald Trump’s “America first” approach to foreign policy. When the House voted in September on a bill to provide $300m to train and equip Ukrainian fighters, a majority of Republicans – 117 members – opposed it.Republicans also now have more power in Congress than they did when the war in Ukraine began. Although Democrats previously controlled both chambers, Republicans now hold a narrow majority in the House. That new strength has emboldened them to insist that any supplemental funding for Ukraine also include robust border security measures, many of which are unpalatable to Democrats.The standoff comes at a dangerous point in Ukraine’s fight against Russia. The White House has warned that the US is “out of money and nearly out of time” to assist Ukraine, suggesting the Russian military will soon gain ground in the war without another infusion of funding for Kyiv.Democrats and Republicans have been negotiating over a potential compromise on border measures to get the aid package across the finish line, but those talks stalled out over the weekend. On Wednesday Joe Biden accused Republicans of negotiating in bad faith.“Republicans think they can get everything they want without any bipartisan compromise. That’s not the answer,” Biden said. “And now they’re willing to literally kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield and damage our national security in the process.”Despite the stark rhetoric, Republicans have presented a united front in their demands for more severe changes to immigration policy. Even Republican lawmakers who remain strongly supportive of additional Ukraine aid, such as the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, have embraced this stance. On Wednesday, McConnell joined his 48 Republican colleagues in opposing the motion to advance the aid package, and he rejected Schumer’s exhortation to “get serious” about threats to democracy.“It is profoundly unserious to pretend that national security priorities don’t include securing our nation’s borders, to warn about borders in jeopardy and not start with the one that’s being overrun here at home,” McConnell said on Thursday. “I’m not in need of any lectures about on the gravity of the challenges facing national security today.”The gridlock has angered and at times perplexed Democrats. In their minds, sending financial aid to US allies such as Ukraine benefits the entire country and thus should be an area of common ground between the two parties. But the recent negotiations appear to have reframed Ukraine aid as a Democratic priority that can only be achieved through concessions to Republicans, specifically on the issue of immigration. That shifting dynamic has not escaped the notice of some frustrated Democrats on Capitol Hill.“I think I’m going to demand that we pass an assault weapons ban or I won’t fund Ukraine,” Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat of Connecticut, told HuffPost. “I guess that’s how things get done around here.”Despite that frustration, Biden appeared open to continuing negotiations on Wednesday, saying he was willing to make “significant compromises on the border” to advance the aid package. McConnell similarly described Wednesday’s failed vote as “a new opportunity to make real progress on legislation that addresses urgent national security priorities”.Schumer also appeared prepared to reopen negotiations on Wednesday, even as he implored Republicans to “come up with something serious instead of the extreme policies they’ve presented thus far”.“This is a serious moment that will have lasting consequences for the 21st century. If Ukraine falls, Putin will not stop there. He will be emboldened,” Schumer said.“Western democracy will begin to enter an age of decline if we aren’t willing to defend it. This Senate – this Republican party – must get serious.” More

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      Senate Republicans set to block advancement of Ukraine-Israel aid bill

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      The Senate will hold a key procedural vote on whether to advance a supplemental funding bill that includes financial aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan as well as provisions aimed at bolstering border security.The vote, which will be held on Wednesday afternoon, is expected to fail due to opposition from Senate Republicans, who have demanded stricter border regulations in exchange for their support.The vote comes one day after Senate Democrats formally unveiled the $111bn supplemental security bill, reflecting the funding request that Joe Biden issued in October to provide assistance to the US’s allies abroad.Ahead of the vote, Biden delivered an address to urge Congress to pass the bill, warning that a failure to act would only benefit Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, in the war against Ukraine.“Who is prepared to walk away from holding Putin accountable for this behavior? Who among us is really prepared to do that?” Biden said. “I’m not prepared to walk away, and I don’t think the American people are either.”Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, addressed leaders of the G7 group of nations and called on them to confound Vladimir Putin by winning “the battle of motivations” and not showing weakness.The G7 leaders met by video at short notice in a show of solidarity with the Ukrainian leader that included trying to breathe new life into the sanctions against Russia.Zelenskiy thanked G7 leaders for their support, and warned that Moscow was counting on collapse of western support for Ukraine. “Russia believes America and Europe will show weakness and will not maintain support for Ukraine at the proper level. Putin believes the free world will not fully enforce its own sanctions and the Russian elite mocks the world’s doubts about using Russian assets to compensate for damage from Russian aggression,” he said.“All these are part of a much broader issue – what can freedom do and what can dictatorships do. We must answer these questions together.”Although the bill includes a number of border security measures, Republicans in both chambers have insisted the legislation must go further in restricting migrants’ asylum and parole applications. Those proposals are a non-starter for many Democrats, making it unclear how a supplemental bill can pass the divided Congress.Biden said on Wednesday that he was willing to make “significant compromises on the border,” but he accused Republicans of taking an all-or-nothing approach to the immigration talks.“This has to be a negotiation,” Biden said. “Republicans think they can get everything they want without any bipartisan compromise. That’s not the answer.”Those tensions spilled over on Tuesday night, when a classified Senate briefing on Ukraine erupted into a shouting match. Zelenskiy was scheduled to speak at the briefing, but he was forced to cancel due to a “last-minute” issue, according to the Democratic Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer.The briefing still occurred despite Zelenskiy’s absence, but Schumer then accused Republicans of having “hijacked” the meeting to discuss border security. Republicans then criticized Schumer for refusing to address the crucial issues that created the current standoff.“Republicans are just walking out of the briefing because the people there are not willing to actually discuss what it takes to get a deal done,” Senator Mitt Romney, a Republican of Utah, said.With no resolution in sight, Senate Republicans are expected to successfully filibuster the supplemental security bill, blocking it from advancing. The impasse increases the likelihood that Congress will fail to approve more aid for Ukraine before the end of the year, as the White House has warned that Kyiv is desperately in need of more financial assistance.“I want to be clear: without congressional action, by the end of the year we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine and to provide equipment from US military stocks,” Shalanda Young, the director of the office of management and budget, wrote in a letter to congressional leaders on Monday.“There is no magical pot of funding available to meet this moment. We are out of money – and nearly out of time.”Even as Republicans have raised serious concerns about the border provisions of the bill, the $10bn allocated for aid to Israel has sparked criticism from Bernie Sanders . In a letter sent to his colleagues on Tuesday, the progressive Vermont senator warned against providing a “blank check” to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, as the death toll in Gaza continues to climb.“No, I do not think we should be appropriating $10.1bn for the right-wing, extremist Netanyahu government to continue its current military strategy,” Sanders wrote. “What the Netanyahu government is doing is immoral, it is in violation of international law, and the United States should not be complicit in those actions.” More

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      Texas legislators pass hardline immigration bill denounced as racist

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      The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, is expected to sign a bill that would make crossing into the state without documentation a crime, one of the harshest immigration policies in the US to date.The bill, SB 4, was passed by the Texas house and is awaiting final approval from Abbott.On Wednesday, Abbott said that he looked forward to signing the bill, in a post to X, formally known as Twitter.“I look forward to signing Senate Bill 4, which creates penalties for illegal entry into Texas & authorizes the removal of illegal immigrants apprehended at the border,” Abbott said.In recent months, Abbott, a Republican, has launched a series of controversial programs targeting migrants, including bussing migrants to Democratic-led cities without proper coordination and Operation Lone Star, a multimillion-dollar initiative that has placed razor wire and thousands of troops at the Texas-Mexico border.SB 4 makes it unlawful for anyone to cross into Texas from another country without papers a state misdemeanor that is punishable by up to two years in prison.The law also requires a state judge to order a person to return to the country they crossed from in lieu of prosecution.If a person refuses to return, they could face a felony charge and up to 20 years in prison.The bill also gives Texas officers the ability to arrest anyone who they believe has crossed into the state illegally, a fact that advocates and Democrats have decried as racist.Legal advocates have questioned the bill’s legality, as removing noncitizens from the US falls under the jurisdiction of the federal government. Experts have also warned that the new bill could cause a dispute with Mexico, as the country and others could choose not to cooperate with state officials.Democratic Texas representatives and advocates soundly denounced the bill as problematic and a waste of state funds.The Texas representative Jolanda Jones called SB 4 and its supporters “racist”.“It’s not all right to be racist. I will stop pulling the race card when you stop being racist,” she said.The Texas representative Ramón Romero Jr posted a video on social media denouncing the passing of SB 4 and emphasizing the importance of winning elections.“We fought really hard but sadly on issues like this, their ears are closed on the other side,” Romero said in a video posted to X, referring to Republicans. “We can say anything and they’re just not listening.”In a statement to X, the Texas Civil Rights Project, a social justice non-profit, said the bill was “creating an entirely new, separate, unequal immigration system in the US” and allowing police to “be both judge and jury to determine a person’s right to stay in the US”.Immigrant rights organizations also rallied outside of the Texas House on Tuesday to protest the vote on SB 4.SB 4 was considered as apart of a separate legislative session requested by Abbott for several anti-immigration bills. More