Thursday, 18 Apr 2024

The House is poised to pass a Republican bill cracking down on unlawful migration at the border.

WASHINGTON — House Republicans on Thursday were poised to push through a sweeping bill that would crack down on unlawful migration at the U.S.-Mexico border, blowing past solid Democratic opposition in a move timed to spotlight their hard-line stance on immigration in the face of a potential border surge.

Republicans, who only narrowly avoided an embarrassing mutiny within their own ranks on the bill, used the floor debate to deliver a stinging rebuke of the Biden administration’s border policies. They rushed to put the bill on the floor on Thursday, aiming to hold the vote before Title 42, the pandemic-era policy allowing for swift expulsion of migrants, expires. The vote is scheduled for the afternoon.

“The cataclysm facing our border is not just due to the end of Title 42, but also to this administration’s complete, complete abdication to do even the bare minimum to secure our southern border, and it is negligence and incompetence,” Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, Republican of Florida and an author of the G.O.P. bill, said on the House floor.

The legislation — which is expected to be universally rejected by House Democrats — has no future in the Democrat-led Senate, where lawmakers have worked quietly and so far unsuccessfully to forge a bipartisan agreement on a measure pairing border security enhancements with an expansion of avenues for migrants to enter the United States legally.

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Two Democratic representatives — Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, and Jerrold Nadler of New York, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee — denounced the bill as “cruel,” “inhumane” and “unworkable.”

And Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, said: “We all of us want to have an orderly system; the disorder is obvious at the border, but this bill won’t fix that.

“It’s mean, but it won’t fix it.”

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