The GOP-controlled House passed a border-security and asylum-reform bill on Thursday, hours before Title 42 is slated to expire.
The package, which passed in a 219-213 vote after months of Republican infighting, is unlikely to advance in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Every House Democrat voted against the bill, the Secure the Border Act of 2023.
The legislation would restart construction on the border wall and require Customs and Border Protection to hire and train 22,000 Border Patrol agents. The agency also would be required to develop a plan to upgrade existing technology.
The bill includes a provision to enshrine the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) into law, as well as a measure to restrict the use of humanitarian parole. Other measures include requiring companies to verify that their employees are legally eligible to work through E-Verify and criminalizing visa overstays of more than ten days.
The Biden administration opposed the bill, writing in a statement of administration policy that it believed the measure would make “elements of our immigration system worse.”
The legislation “does nothing to address the root causes of migration, reduces humanitarian protections, and restricts lawful pathways, which are critical alternatives to unlawful entry,” the statement added.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) called the bill the “Child Deportation Act” and blasted it as “one of the extreme MAGA Republicans’ top priorities.”
“How do they propose to address our broken, fragile immigration system? Well, they want to waste billions and billions of taxpayer dollars on a medieval border wall, a 14th century solution that will not work to a 21st century challenge,” Jeffries said. “They continue to bend the knee to the former twice-impeached president of the United States of America in terms of their policy proposals.”
“The Republican approach is anchored in xenophobia and fanning the flames of hatred and distrust and of irresponsible policies that will do nothing to solve the problem,” he added.
The House passed the law hours before the Title 42 public-health order is set to expire. The order allowed the U.S. to immediately expel migrants without an asylum hearing. U.S. authorities recorded more than 10,600 illegal crossings on Tuesday — the highest one-day total ever — as migrants arrive at the border in hopes of entering the U.S. once the order expires.
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy warned on the House floor on Wednesday that “everyone knows we are days away from disaster.”
He blasted Biden’s record of “record crossings, record carelessness, record chaos” and called the Republican bill “the strongest border-security bill to come through Congress in more than 100 years.”