WASHINGTON, Feb. 7, 2024—The Senate’s $118 billion spending bill, which includes major provisions that would significantly limit asylum at the southern border, looks unlikely to survive a vote scheduled today in Congress. However, proposals and language in the bill’s border deal will likely reappear in future policy debates.
Given this, the American Immigration Council has prepared a fact sheet breaking down the major proposals in the border-related parts of the spending bill.
We explain what the bill does, and what it doesn’t do (crucially, it doesn’t “shut down” the border). And we lay out what we really need at the border: a system that doesn’t prioritize penalizing asylum seekers, because this approach does little to impact the overall number of people arriving at the border in the long term. We need a way to resolve asylum cases quickly and efficiently, but without the opaque emergency authority that’s included in the border language in this bill.
