A bipartisan group of lawmakers in Congress is on the verge of striking a deal with the Biden administration that would enact sweeping new border controls, including the authority to pause asylum processing during spikes in migrant crossings, three people familiar with the talks told CBS News.
After weeks of closed-door negotiations, the White House and a trio of senators could unveil an agreement as early as this week, the sources said, requesting anonymity due to the private nature of the conversations. The bill is designed to reduce the unprecedented levels of illegal crossings recorded along the southern border in the past three years.
While GOP Sen. James Lankford, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy and independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema are close to finalizing the compromise with the White House, any bipartisan immigration proposal would face an uphill battle in the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson and other conservative lawmakers have pushed for even stricter changes to the asylum system.
Divisions among Republican lawmakers over whether to support a border deal with Mr. Biden have also intensified after former President Donald Trump came out against it. At a rally in Las Vegas on Saturday, Trump said he would “rather have no bill than a bad bill.”
I was curious to see how these limits would compare to today’s number, so I was looking at the government’s border data.
Doing the back of the napkin math in 2.47m encounters in 2023, this would basically throttle daily encounters to around 74% of today’s volume.
It looks like previous peaks that got Americans riled up were around 1.6m a year. It’s now it’s around 2.4m a years during 2022 and 2023. I had no idea the numbers shot up that much in the last 2 year. That’s bonkers if I’m interpreting this correctly.
These changes would basically dial things back to the numbers seen during past “holy shit” peaks.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/09/whats-happening-at-the-u-s-mexico-border-in-7-charts/ft_21-11-01_mexicoborder_1a/
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/nationwide-encounters?ssp=1&setlang=en&cc=US&safesearch=moderate