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Just before the U.S. Senate voted to kill the border-security package on Wednesday, co-author Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Arizona, said Republicans’ refusal to debate the bill was “shameful.�

“We all negotiated in good faith. We delivered. We produced a bill many thought impossible,� Sinema told her colleagues. “Less than 24 hours after we released the bill, my Republican colleagues changed their minds. Turns out, they want all talk and no action. It turns out border security is not actually a risk to our national security; it’s just a talking point for the election.�

Reaction to the bipartisan bill included opposition from immigrant-rights activists and progressive Democrats, who decried the bill’s limits on access to asylum and lack of a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented people in the U.S.

Republican opponents in both chambers of Congress, including Arizona Rep. Juan Ciscomani, said the bill didn’t go far enough.

“We need a much tougher approach to stop this crisis,� Ciscomani posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday. He was not available for an interview on his specific objections to the bill.

Some Arizona immigrant-rights advocates say the legislation backed by President Joe Biden highlights moderate Democrats’ rightward shift on immigration, embracing a level of asylum restriction that would have been unthinkable before Donald Trump’s election.

"We believed that the United States is a country of welcome,� said Joanna Williams, executive director of Kino Border Initiative. “It’s discouraging for us to see this legislation get bipartisan support, even support from people we thought might be more inclined to hear the voices of the moms and dads who are here at the border (seeking asylum). The general work we have to build a more humane and just system is such a steeper climb than what we thought it would be.�

Some immigrant-rights advocates were optimistic about certain measures in the bill, such as funding for thousands more asylum officers and quicker work-permit approval for migrants granted asylum.

National Immigration Forum President and CEO Jennie Murray said in a Tuesday statement, “We hope that reports of this bill’s death are premature. Although it has its shortcomings, the bill represents a promising effort from Republicans and Democrats to work together on serious border and immigration challenges. On the whole, we support its passage.�

The bill also would have provided $60 billion in wartime aid to Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer indicated legislators would try to move forward with a modified package, excluding the border provisions, aimed at salvaging the wartime funding, the Associated Press Wednesday.

Details of legislation

The bipartisan border bill got support from the union representing 18,000 Border Patrol agents and personnel, in a break from the group’s usual alignment with Trump, who urged legislators to reject the bill.

"This will allow us to remove single adults expeditiously and without a lengthy judicial review, which historically has required the release of these individuals into the interior of the U.S.,� the National Border Patrol Council said in a Monday statement. “This alone will drop illegal border crossings nationwide and will allow a great many of our agents to get back to detecting and apprehending those who want to cross our borders illegally and evade apprehension.�

The legislation would have increased employment visas and family visas by a total of 50,000, said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, associate policy analyst for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

"The bigger picture for us is that it’s worth celebrating that there was a bipartisan decision to come together and have this recognition that what’s happening at the border is unsustainable and that something has to change,� she said. “It is really remarkable, despite the very quick downturn and potential demise that we’re seeing.�

The bill included a new emergency expulsion authority for the Homeland Security secretary: If the number of illegal border crossings averaged more than 5,000 daily over a five-day period, any more migrants who crossed between ports of entry would be expelled without having the chance to make an asylum claim — similar to the protocol under the pandemic-era Title 42 policy, which ended last May.

Migrants could still apply for asylum at ports of entry, but capacity has long been extremely limited there, advocates say.

Opponents have misrepresented the 5,000 figure to suggest that it means 5,000 migrants a day would be allowed into the U.S.

In fact, those arrivals between ports of entry would face a higher threshold for passing their initial “fear� interview with asylum officers after they’re taken into custody, raising the standard from “credible fear� to “reasonable fear.�

It would also eliminate the ability for rejected asylum seekers to appeal to the immigration courts. That access to judicial review is a critical due process for asylum seekers, said Chelsea Sachau, manager attorney on the Border Action Team for the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project.

The legislation “is a disgrace,� she said. “It really embraces extreme restrictions on asylum. It’s going to not only exacerbate, but actually cause, immense human suffering at the border for anyone seeking protection in the U.S.�

Even credible asylum cases can be difficult to prove, particularly for migrants who don’t have a lawyer, who speak an Indigenous language with few accessible translators, or who are in the midst of deeply traumatic experiences, said Williams of the Kino Border Initiative. The Catholic-led nonprofit provides humanitarian and legal aid to migrants on the border.

"Our asylum system is already denying cases of people who are in imminent danger,� Williams said. “There’s already well-documented cases of people who have been sent back and experienced harm.�

The 5,000-person trigger for the emergency expulsion authority will be a “rollercoaster� for border agents and migrants alike, trying to keep track on any given day of whether the border was “open� or “closed� to asylum claims, she said.

"The system will change every day,� she said. “That means for people who are vulnerable and in need of protection, the determination on their case will be based on the luck of the draw: the precise time they walk across the border.�

Mexican criminal groups who control human smuggling routes to the border will respond by seeking to profit from the unpredictability at the border, she said. The legislation also doesn’t account for the need for Mexico to agree to accept non-Mexican migrants that the U.S. turns away.

"When I finally read the actual text released on Sunday, my first reaction was, ‘This is deeply impractical,’� Williams said.

Immigrant rights advocates say the bill is a betrayal of U.S. commitment to international treaty agreements and domestic law, which allows people to request asylum once on U.S. soil, regardless of whether they entered at a port of entry or between ports.

Currently, about 50% of asylum cases are approved, according to Syracuse University researchers who manage the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC.

Almost 32,000 asylum petitions were granted in 2023 in the immigration courts, according to the Department of Justice. An additional 15,468 claims were approved by asylum officers with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Chief: Border agents need back up

The bipartisan border package allocated $723 million for more border agents.

Arizona stakeholders have argued that legislators and media have focused too much on the need for border agents and enforcement, and paid too little attention to ports of entry and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers who man them. CBP’s officers usually wear blue shirts, while Border Patrol agents who operate between ports of entry wear green uniforms.

Experts say building out infrastructure to receive asylum seekers at the ports would relieve pressure on agents between ports of entry and reduce demand for human smugglers, who exploit the lack of legitimate avenues to request asylum at the ports.

Migration trends on the border have been evolving for a decade now: Border-crossers are no longer primarily Mexican men seeking work, but increasingly families arriving from around the world, said Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, or WOLA, a D.C.-based research and advocacy group that promotes human rights and social justice.

Yet the immigration system hasn’t evolved to meet the new reality, he said.

While stakeholders are starting to recognize the changing demographics, the system has long suffered from “a lack of imagination and a lack of ability to adjust to the new reality,� he said.

Border agents alone won’t solve the problem, Isacson said. The number of agents has increased significantly since the 1990s, from less than 6,000 in 1996 to more than 19,000 today.

Even as the number of migrant arrivals between ports of entry has surged, Border Patrol’s staffing increases mean the ratio of migrant apprehension per agent is actually lower than it was in the 1990s, Isacson said.

Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector Chief John Modlin said while that’s true, agents in the ‘90s faced less time-intensive processing for the migrants they apprehended, who were usually trying to evade detection and were subjected to a quick voluntary removal.

Today, agents are dealing with large numbers of migrants turning themselves in and requesting asylum. Processing those migrants can take more than 90 minutes each, keeping agents from their primary mission of apprehending those trying to evade detection, Modlin said in a Jan. 30 interview.

That processing doesn’t actually require a law-enforcement background: A new civilian position within Border Patrol, that of “processing coordinator,� has helped to alleviate the burden on agents and could be expanded, Modlin said.

The Tucson sector has hired about 150 processing coordinators in the last nine months, and could use double that amount, he said.

"They have been a fantastic help,� he said.

It’s a tough job, being one of the first points of contact with migrants who may have been traumatized and assaulted on their journey, he said, but these civilian positions tend to be filled quickly when posted.

"There are just a lot of people that want to help, that believe in the mission,� Modlin said. “They just don’t necessarily want to be in law enforcement.�

The system has also long needed more resources for immigration courts to process asylum seekers who today are being released into the U.S. to await court hearings years down the road, Modlin said. The latest statistics show the immigration courts system now has a backlog of 3 million cases.

"Certainly, I would not turn down more agents in the Tucson sector,� Modlin said last week. “The challenge, though, is that the whole system really needs to move at the same rate, to expand at the same rate, whether it’s an increase in asylum officers, an increase in immigration judges, the detention space to hold people until there is a hearing. If only one part of the system is expanding, it ultimately will bottleneck and that’s what you’re seeing now."