The US Senate presented this Sunday a long-awaited bipartisan bill to strengthen border security and help Ukraine and Israel with a total budget of $118 billion. The text is expected to be put to a vote throughout the week, but expectations regarding its approval are uncertain given the opposition of hard-line Republicans and also the more progressive faction of the Democrats, who hold the majority. in the Senate by a single vote difference.
A day after the president of the House of Representatives, Republican Mike Johnson, announced that the approval of new aid to Israel was unrelated to that planned for Ukraine due to differences between both parties, the expected bipartisan agreement of the upper house gives the green light to the complete package, which subordinated aid to the two countries at war to a border agreement due to Republican insistence.
The drafting of the 370-page draft has taken three months in negotiations led by Senators James Lankford (R-Okla.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and independent and former Democrat Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona).
At the forefront of the agreement are restrictions on asylum, a major point of friction in recent weeks. The full provision of the bill, adding funds for the border and aid to Ukraine and Israel, as well as other important foreign policy priorities, amounts to $118 billion, of which about $20 billion goes to strengthening security border.
The rest of the items are divided between 60,060 million dollars to support Ukraine in its war against Russia, 14,100 million to contribute to the security of Israel, 2,440 million dollars for the United States Central Command and the current conflict at sea Red, with almost daily attacks by Houthi militias; plus $4.83 billion to support US allies in the Indo-Pacific amid growing hostility between Taiwan and China, according to a Senate source cited by Reuters.
Another $10 billion would go to humanitarian aid for the civilian population of Gaza, the West Bank and Ukraine, according to the same source.
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“The priorities of this bill are too important to ignore and too vital to allow politics to get in the way,” Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader, said in a statement. “The United States and our allies face multiple, complex and, in some places, coordinated challenges from adversaries seeking to disrupt democracy and expand authoritarian influence around the world.”
The leader of the Republican minority in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, has supported the negotiations, considering that his party would not achieve a better agreement under a White House in Republican hands. His other co-religionists maintain, however, that President Joe Biden could enact many of the changes in immigration policy through executive action.
President Biden had asked Congress in October to pass a law that would provide additional funds for aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, in an uncertain context due to the conflict bogged down in Ukraine; a protracted war between Israel and Hamas and the subsequent presidential election in Taiwan, which gave victory to a candidate China considers a danger.
But Biden's request stalled due to the insistence of Republicans in the House of Representatives, where they have the majority, on linking it to a change in immigration policy.
Immigration, which is on track to become the central issue of the campaign for the November presidential elections, is the second concern of Americans, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published this Wednesday, in addition to a spearhead for Republicans when attacking his Democratic rivals. The US Border Patrol detained about two million immigrants at the border in fiscal year 2023. There were more than 300,000 crossings in December alone, surpassing the 240,000 crossings recorded in each of the last four months.
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