A White House meeting between President Joe Biden and congressional leaders failed to yield an agreement on an aid package to bolster Ukraine in its war against Russia.
House Republicans led by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refused to advance legislation authorizing more aid to Ukraine in the absence of significant progress on a plan to secure the southern border.
“I told the president what I had been saying for many months, and that is that we must have change at the border, substantive policy change,” Johnson said, according to The New York Times. “We must insist — must insist — that the border be the top priority.”
Biden called the meeting to stress the importance of supporting Ukraine. Johnson said that providing aid was “important” but was not the most pressing priority facing the United States. House Republicans have passed legislation to stem the record-high levels of unlawful migration, including ending the Biden administration’s “catch and release” approach and reinstating the Remain in Mexico policy enacted under former President Donald Trump.
Democrats left the meeting expressing hope that a deal could be made in the near future. Many Democrat leaders have begun pressing the White House to make significant changes to border security efforts in the wake of busing programs that have sent thousands of unlawful migrant migrants to self-described sanctuary cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
“There was broad agreement in the room that we had to do this in a bipartisan way,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said, per NYT. “I am more optimistic than ever before that we can come to an agreement.”
The meeting largely focused on the alleged consequences of not spending more taxpayer money on aid to Ukraine, which purportedly included weakening NATO and endangering American interests globally. Johnson said that any deal regarding aid to Ukraine must include a better accountability system.
The United States has given the war-torn country more than $113 billion in military and financial aid so far. The most recent report on accountability, issued in March 2023, from the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General has not substantiated any “significant” instances of waste or fraud but notes that investigations are ongoing.
Democrats have so far been unwilling to budge on efforts to revise or cap the number of unlawful migrants paroled into the United States, which is a key sticking point for Republicans. Data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows that more than 300,000 unlawful migrants were paroled into the United States in 2023, a nearly three-fold increase over 2022, and border patrol encounters with “inadmissible” migrants exceeded 788,000 last year.