Senate Approves $4.6 Billion for Border With Few Restrictions

“While I pray that the funding Congress has approved makes it to its intended purpose, the best predictor of the future is the past,” Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts and one of four Democrats to vote against the House measure, wrote in a Medium post explaining her vote. The administration’s immigration enforcement agencies, she wrote, “have a track record of promoting a deep culture of corruption and abuse.”

Republican senators remain adamant that the emergency aid, widely seen as a temporary response to a more complex immigration crisis, needs to be stripped of immigration policymaking.

“Our goal is to get a good bill, keep it clean as we can and try to have the president on board,” said Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee. “If it’s loaded up with a bunch of House amendments, he will not sign it.”

Even as they promoted their bill, Ms. Pelosi and Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader, acknowledged publicly and privately that the Senate bill was not necessarily an untenable vote in their chamber.

“The Senate has a good bill,” Ms. Pelosi told her caucus during a closed-door meeting on Wednesday, according to a senior Democratic aide unauthorized to discuss the private meeting. “Our bill is much better.”

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate minority leader, noted in floor remarks that while the House version “is a much better bill than the Senate version,” the broad bipartisan support in a Senate committee vote last week indicates that “there is room for compromise to get something done here.”

The House measure includes additional oversight provisions that outline a time frame for the release of children from the facilities, as well as health and safety standards and requirements for children and adults held by the government.

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