Senate Releases Long-Awaited Text Of Bipartisan Border Security Bill + Reactions

The United States Senate published the text of a long-awaited deal to enact border security reforms in exchange for aid to Ukraine on Sunday, marking the end of negotiations that had begun in December.

The 370-page bill — titled the Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2024 — would appropriate $118 billion to both provide aid to Ukraine during its war against Russia and Israel during its conflict with Hamas until Sept. 30, as well as fund border security reforms. The latter reforms include the hiring of new immigration judges to expedite the processing of asylum and deportation proceedings as well as law enforcement operations to detain and remove foreign nationals present illegally in the United States.

“The border security bill will put a huge number of new enforcement tools in the hands of a future administration and push the current Administration to finally stop the illegal flow. The bill provides funding to build the wall, increase technology at the border, and add more detention beds, more agents, and more deportation flights,” wrote Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, the chief GOP negotiator of the bill. “The border security bill ends the abuse of parole on our southwest border that has waived in over a million people. It dramatically changes our ambiguous asylum laws by conducting fast screenings at a higher standard of evidence, limited appeals, and fast deportation.”

A key provision of the bill in Title IV is the creation of an emergency authority to summarily remove foreign nationals who enter the U.S. illegally, without standard removal proceedings under Title 8, if the week-long average of such entrants increases to over 5,000 persons per day. This summary removal requirement expires only once the two-week average number of illegal entries decreases to 3,750 persons per day.

This provision has proved to be controversial among Republicans, who responded to its disclosure ahead of the bill’s release and have argued that it will not meaningfully reduce illegal immigration. The bill imposes caps on the number of days in a calendar year that the emergency authority may be exercised.

“I never believed we should link policy demands to emergency aid for our allies, but Republicans insisted—so Democrats negotiated in good faith over many weeks and now there is a bipartisan deal on border policy legislation,” wrote Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray, who released the bill’s text. “Ukraine’s fate and so much more hangs in the balance—it’s time for Congress to act.”

This is a breaking news story and may be updated.

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