Lawmakers have 'agreement in principle' on border security talks
Published 30 mins ago
Last Update 5 mins ago
Lawmakers have 'agreement in principle' on border security talks
By Samuel Chamberlain | Fox News
Shutdown negotiators: We have an agreement
Congress announces they have reached an agreement they believe President Trump will sign.
Congressional negotiators revealed Monday evening that they've reached "an agreement in principle" on border security funding and other issues that could avert a second partial government shutdown this year.
When asked if they had an agreement that President Trump would approve, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, told reporters: "We think so. We hope so." Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, declined to give details of the deal but said a final text could be released by Wednesday. Lawmakers have until 11:59 p.m. Friday to get the agreement through both houses of Congress and signed by Trump before several Cabinet-level departments shut down and hundreds of thousands of federal workers are furloughed.
Much of the focus on the agreement will surround how much money will be allotted for Trump's long-promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The White House has asked for $5.7 billion for the barrier, which congressional Democrats have refused to fund. The Trump administration countered by dangling the possibility that the president would
TRUMP HOLDS RALLY IN TEXAS AMID BORDER WALL DEBATE
However, Democrats have agreed to at least some money for border structures and have focused on reducing funding for detention beds to curb what they see as unnecessarily harsh enforcement by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The detention beds issue threatened to scupper talks over the weekend, but both parties apparently worked past that issue. A House Democratic aide told The Associated Press Republicans had already agreed to funding cuts that would require ICE to ramp down the number of detention beds to a range of 34,000-38,500 by the end of the year. ICE currently detains about 49,000 immigrants on average per day.
https://media2.foxnews.com/BrightCov...7829001-vs.jpg[COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2)]Video
But a proposal to cap at 16,500 the number of detainees caught in areas away from the border — a limit Democrats say is aimed at preventing overreach by the agency — ran into its own Republican wall.
Shelby told reporters Monday night that the bed issue had been worked out, but declined to give details. "We think it's going to work," he said. "We had some hard negotiations."
"
ICE is being asked to ignore the laws that Congress has already passed," said agency Deputy Director Matt Albence on a media call organized by the White House. "It will be extremely damaging to the public safety of this country. If we are forced to live within a cap based on interior arrests, we will immediately be forced to release criminal aliens that are currently sitting in our custody."
According to ICE figures, 66 percent of the nearly 159,000 immigrants it reported detaining last year were previously convicted of crimes. In 2016 under President Barack Obama, around 110,000 immigrants were detained and 86 percent had criminal records.
At the White House Monday afternoon, Trump softened his rhetoric on the wall but ratcheted it up when alluding to the detention beds issue.
"We can call it anything. We'll call it barriers, we'll call it whatever they want," the president said. "But now it turns out not only don't they want to give us money for a wall, they don't want to give us the space to detain murderers, criminals, drug dealers, human smugglers.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/law...security-talks
