By STEPHEN GROVES, LISA MASCARO and COLLEEN LONG
WASHINGTON — Top Biden administration officials were laboring on Wednesday to try to reach a last-minute deal for wartime aid for Ukraine by agreeing to Senate Republican demands to bolster U.S.-Mexico border policies to cut crossings, but Congress prepared to depart Washington with the impasse unresolved.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was expected to resume talks with Senate negotiators even as advocates for immigrants and members of President Joe Biden’s own Democratic Party fretted about the policies under discussion. Some demonstrated at the Capitol, warning of a return to the hardline border and immigration policies of the Trump era.
Congress is scheduled to leave Washington on Thursday, leaving little time to reach an agreement on Biden’s $110 billion request for Ukraine, Israel and other national security needs. While White House officials and key Senate negotiators appeared to be narrowing on a list of priorities to tighten the U.S.-Mexico border and remove some recent migrant arrivals already in the U.S., Senate Republicans said that not enough progress had been made to justify staying in Washington.
The dour mood came just a day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited to implore lawmakers for support. If Congress departs, it will leave for weeks with one of the U.S.’s key international commitments — helping halt Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion into Ukraine — seriously in doubt. Also left hanging would be a deal on one of the most unwieldy issues in American politics — immigration and border security.
“This is difficult, very difficult,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a speech on the Senate floor on Wednesday. “But we’re sent here to do difficult things.”
Among the proposals being seriously discussed, according to several people familiar with the private talks, are plans to allow Homeland Security officials to…
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