Mark Morgan remembers feeling encouraged about the feedback he was getting from the Biden transition team in 2021, as it got up to speed on the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.
As the head of Customs and Border Protection, he expected President Biden to chart a new course on immigration. But he thought the incoming administration had been warned — and understood — that an immediate wholesale erasure of Trump policies, without a competent plan to replace it, would be a mistake.
“We laid that out for them and they ignored it all,” Mr. Morgan said. “Somewhere between the transition team and the political appointees in the Biden administration, it all broke down.”
Fast-forward three years and Mr. Biden is now facing the worst border conditions in modern history, with a record number of migrants arriving — and being released into the country, along with record amounts of fentanyl and record numbers of terrorism suspects.
Now Mr. Biden finds himself trapped, demanding nearly $100 billion from Congress to help Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan defend their borders, but reluctant to negotiate with Republicans over the kind of policy changes experts say would reduce the number of migrants entering the country illegally.
Yet it was Mr. Biden who connected the issues, asking Congress for $14 billion in money for immigration processing, hoping he might entice Republicans with cash. Instead, he delivered what Mr. Morgan called “ultimate leverage” to Republicans.
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“Everybody knows part of his legacy is going to be continued funding for Ukraine. If that doesn’t happen that’s going to be an extreme failure,” Mr. Morgan said. “The Republicans have this incredible opportunity that the president teed up for them to use his desire to get more funding for Ukraine to actually force him to change policy on the border.”
Senate Democrats have already tried to pass a spending bill that matched Mr. Biden’s request, without the border changes the GOP is demanding. Every Republican joined the successful filibuster.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer lashed out this week, accusing Republicans of abandoning democratic allies in Ukraine over “unrealistic, maximalist demands on the border.”
“I want to be very clear: Democrats very much want an agreement if possible,” the New York Democrat said. “If Republicans keep insisting on Donald Trump’s border policies, then they will be at fault when a deal for aid to Ukraine, Israel, and humanitarian aid to Gaza fall apart.”
Ukraine backers say Congress should tackle the things it can agree on, and wait on the border debate.
That argument was on display Monday night as The Wall Street Journal hosted House Speaker Mike Johnson.
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Tony Abbott, Australia’s former prime minister and now a trade adviser to the British government, told the Louisiana Republican that Ukrainians were fighting Russia and dying so American and British troops didn’t have to. He said he understood the demands to fix America’s border but pleaded not to tie the two.
“Just because you can’t get both things right, isn’t it better to get one thing right?” he said.
Mr. Johnson countered, saying Americans are dying from the border mess. He pointed out that fentanyl is the leading cause of death of those 18 to 49 in the U.S.
“When I go home, the American people, my constituents and constituents all around this country, are demanding that we get control of that border. And we can do both,” he said.
He also summed up the frustration with Mr. Biden’s delay in acting on his own.
“It’s a policy change that’s very simple to do. The president could easily do this, but they are unwilling. But I cannot for the life of me understand why,” the speaker said.
One reason why is Mr. Biden’s political left flank.
As the talks on Capitol Hill progressed, and it seemed like a deal might be possible, Hispanic Democrats yanked at negotiators’ leash, saying this wasn’t what they signed up for when they backed Mr. Biden.
Rep. Nanette Barragan, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and Sen. Alex Padilla, chairman of the Senate’s chief immigration policy subcommittee, issued a joint statement calling the GOP proposals “cruel” and said they would result in “terrorizing” migrants.
The two California Democrats chastised Mr. Biden for letting the negotiations get this far.
“We are deeply concerned that the president would consider advancing Trump-era immigration policies that Democrats fought so hard against — and that he himself campaigned against — in exchange for aid to our allies that Republicans already support,” they said.
There’s an assumption in their statement — that Republicans support Ukraine funding — that is not universally true.
While party leaders in Washington largely back the money for Ukraine, GOP voters are deeply skeptical. Nearly half of them now say the U.S. is providing too much aid already, according to a Pew Research poll released last week. Just 13% said the U.S. should do more.
Stephen Miller, a former top adviser to Mr. Trump whose name has become synonymous with his immigration policy, said it’s Mr. Biden who is squandering a chance to show how much he values Ukraine.
“The White House is so committed to its project of rapidly resettling the third world in America that it has evidently decided it never believed any of its wild claims that the fate of human democracy rests on the shoulders of Ukraine,” Mr. Miller, now president of America First Legal, told The Times.
At least publicly, the White House is talking past Republicans.
Asked about the president’s approach to border negotiations, spokesman Andrew Bates told reporters traveling on Air Force One on Monday that Mr. Biden is focused on Ukraine and stopping Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Putin has indicated that, if he is successful there, he has designs on other Eastern European countries who are members of NATO and who we are obligated to defend. And like the president has been explicit about, we would defend them. So, it would be infinitely more expensive in every way not to act on this supplemental,” Mr. Bates said.
The crises are all coming to a head right now.
The White House says Ukraine is about to run out of ammunition to fight Russia, and Congress must act by the end of this month to keep U.S. aid flowing uninterrupted.
At the same time, however, the border saw its worst day ever last week, with more than 12,000 people encountered by CBP in one day. The overall pace is nearly 10,000 a day, according to lawmakers.
Sen. Christopher Murphy, Connecticut Democrat, said he accepts the need to make changes, but he balked at being forced to cave to “Donald Trump’s immigration policies” to win Ukraine money.
“What I know is that the future of the world is at stake,” he recently told NBC News. “If we fail, if Republicans don’t get reasonable in the next 24 to 48 hours, Russia is going to march into Ukraine. China is going to be given a green light to invade Taiwan. The world, for my children, is fundamentally different under that scenario.”
Republicans, though, point out that it was Mr. Biden who tied the border to Ukraine with his original October demand for a $106 billion emergency national security spending bill.
“The president himself started by saying, if we’re going to deal with national security, we’ve got to deal with Ukraine and we have to deal with the border,” Sen. James Lankford, Oklahoma Republican, told CBS News.
Mr. Schumer on Tuesday rejected that notion, saying the White House “just put together a bill” but never meant to insist Ukraine and the U.S. border be inextricably linked.
“It’s the Republicans, plain and simple,” he said.
Mr. Murphy and Mr. Lankford are part of a group of senators that has been meeting to try to come up with a border agreement.
They had reportedly neared a change to asylum policy that would discourage the rampant abuse of the system, which allows people to come and lodge bogus claims, earning quick release and years of living here while their cases plod through the immigration courts, only to be denied at the end.
But Democrats were less willing to accept limits to Mr. Biden’s expansive “parole” powers, which have been used to facilitate catch-and-release of roughly 2 million undocumented immigrants since January 2021.
Mr. Biden, at a press conference Tuesday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said he is still reaching for a deal. But he said the GOP was being intransigent.
“Compromise is how democracy works and I’m ready and offered compromise already,” he said. “Holding Ukraine funding hostage in an attempt to force through an extreme Republican partisan agenda on the border is not how it works.”
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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