With Shutdown Looming, Border Deal Is Reached ‘in Principle’

Politics

“She has confidence that I made the right decision,” Ms. Lowey told reporters.

White House officials did not respond to requests for comment about the terms of the agreement, and the president’s conservative allies on Monday night were already denouncing the deal. Sean Hannity, a Fox News commentator and a confidant of the president’s, called it “a garbage compromise.”

Pentagon officials spent the weekend readying for the possibility that Mr. Trump would declare a national emergency, something that his allies said he is still considering as a means to secure border wall funding.

But Republican lawmakers remained optimistic that their agreement would hold.

“This has been a difficult one,” said Representative Kay Granger of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee. “I think everyone will say, ‘Good work.’”

A specific point of contention had been the number of detention beds under the control of ICE, which had stalled talks over the weekend.

House Democrats, urged on by immigration rights groups, had pushed hard, hoping to leverage White House fears of another damaging shutdown into a softening of the president’s hard-line immigration policies that they say have torn apart families, wrenched productive workers from the communities they have lived in for years and infused a heartlessness into official American immigration policy.

The Democrats’ goal was to cut the overall number of detention beds, including those occupied by asylum seekers and people caught at the border, from its current level of around 49,000 to 34,000, the number funded during the Obama administration, Democratic aides said. That, they say, would end sweeps and roundups, and force ICE to focus on pursuing hardened criminals.

“We started at zero on the wall, and we compromised a lot after that, and we are now asking them to change, too,” said Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard, Democrat of California and a member of the 17-member House and Senate conference committee tasked with hammering out a compromise.

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