(RNS) — While congressional Democrats are chiding Republican senators for walking away from a compromise immigration bill that restricts asylum, faith-based agencies that work with refugees and asylum-seekers expressed alarm in recent days about provisions of the bill and the turn that the conversation about immigration has taken.“You’re not going to solve anything at the border when you start from the premise that migration is a threat to our country or that migrants are people to be feared,” said Dylan Corbett, executive director of Hope Border Institute, a Catholic organization that supports migrants across the El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, border.
The wide-ranging bill, which came together after months of bipartisan negotiations, introduced a “border emergency authority” under which, when a certain threshold of migrant encounters is reached, most migrants crossing unlawfully would automatically be expelled rather than be allowed to seek asylum.
The bill also raised the legal standard for credible fear of persecution in migrants’ initial asylum screening and accelerated the timeline for asylum processing.
On Wednesday (Feb. 7), most Senate Republicans voted against the bill, with some claiming the problem is President Joe Biden’s failure to enforce existing laws. By the time of the vote it was clear the mood for compromise had disappeared, and any hopes of moving forward on the measure — negotiated under the leadership of Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford, Arizona independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy — had fallen apart.
Murphy and other Democrats …
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The wide-ranging bill, which came together after months of bipartisan negotiations, introduced a “border emergency authority” under which, when a certain threshold of migrant encounters is reached, most migrants crossing unlawfully would automatically be expelled rather than be allowed to seek asylum.
The bill also raised the legal standard for credible fear of persecution in migrants’ initial asylum screening and accelerated the timeline for asylum processing.
On Wednesday (Feb. 7), most Senate Republicans voted against the bill, with some claiming the problem is President Joe Biden’s failure to enforce existing laws. By the time of the vote it was clear the mood for compromise had disappeared, and any hopes of moving forward on the measure — negotiated under the leadership of Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford, Arizona independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy — had fallen apart.
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