Barbara Mikulski: Senate moving on border funding

Politico

By Seung Min Kim and Burgess Everett

July 22, 2014

Barbara Mikulski: Senate moving on border funding 

A top Senate Democrat said Monday that her chamber is likely to move President Barack Obama’s emergency funding request for the crisis on the border later this week or early next week.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) told reporters that she plans to brief the 55-member Senate Democratic Caucus on details on her funding measure at their weekly lunch on Tuesday.

Mikulski said she hopes to release the framework of the funding measure on Wednesday morning, and stresses that “I’m going to try” when asked whether a supplemental will pass before lawmakers leave for a monthlong recess starting in August.

She declined to say whether the version that will move through the Democratic-led Senate will fully fund the request from Obama, totaling about $3.7 billion.

“I think it would be a shame if we didn’t” pass funding before the congressional recess, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told POLITICO on Monday. “They’re going to start running out of money in August. So we’re ready to do it.”

Although no final decisions have been made, Senate Democrats are highly unlikely to push legislative changes to a 2008 anti-trafficking law intended to provide extra legal protections to migrant children from countries other than Mexico or Canada. When asked whether he would move a so-called clean funding bill, Reid declined to elaborate, saying, “I know what I want to do, and I’ll tell” Senate Democrats at lunches on Tuesday.

The White House initially floated the changes, and amending the law is a top demand of congressional Republicans in exchange for additional funding. But powerful congressional Democrats have spoken out against any revisions to the 2008 law, and say Obama has ample authority under the current law — through its “exceptional circumstances” provisions — to act on his own to accelerate some of the minors’ cases.

Still, the divisions between the two parties over the border issue complicate the prospects of an emergency funding measure reaching Obama’s desk before the August recess.

“I don’t plan to support it, period,” Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Monday.

Republicans are now pointing to a new analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that shows only $25 million of Obama’s emergency funding request — all under the umbrella of the Department of Health and Human Services — would be spent this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. Obama administration officials have urged Congress to pass the additional funding immediately, telling lawmakers that key agencies will begin running out of money starting next month otherwise.

“The Homeland Security and other agencies, Health and Human Services, have moneys that they can apply to these problems,” said Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the top Republican on the Budget Committee. “I’m not saying no money is needed now, because we want to treat children and be helpful and humanitarian, treat them in a humanitarian and a compassionate way.

“But we don’t need $4 billion. That’s clear,” Sessions continued. He demanded that any supplemental funding request sent to Obama include a requirement that funding be blocked for federal initiatives that grants undocumented immigrants work permits — such as to beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

The developments in the Senate comes as the number of unaccompanied minors being caught at the southwestern border dropped dramatically in the past several weeks, according to the White House.

In the first 14 days of July, Customs and Border Protection officials apprehended an average of 150 unaccompanied children per day in the Rio Grande Valley — a figure that has plunged from about 355 per day in June.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said although that drop can’t be attributed to any one factor, “we do believe that the administration’s response and efforts to work with Central American leaders to publicize the dangers of the journey and reinforce that apprehended migrants are ultimately returned to their home countries in keeping with the law, as well as seasonal flows, have all played a part.”

Earnest, however, said it was still “critical” for Congress to back the administration’s supplemental request.

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