White House: Republicans holding Covid funding ‘hostage’ over immigration demand

The White House has accused Republicans of holding federal Covid-19 response funding “hostage” over their immigration demand.

The Biden administration is currently facing backlash over plans to drop the Trump era public health measure known as Title 42, which allows Homeland Security agents to turn away migrants at the border due to the risk of Covid-19 spread.

“Title 42 is not an immigration plan or an immigration authority. No one in the administration thinks that. It’s an authority given to the CDC actually by Congress,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Fox News Sunday.

Earlier this month, three Republican attorneys general lodged a lawsuit saying that it is illegal for the administration to rescind the CDC’s Title 42 policy.

Also, Republicans Tuesday blocked a Democratic attempt to start Senate debate on a $10 billion COVID-19 compromise, a day after Democratic and GOP bargainers had reached agreement on providing the money for treatments, vaccines and testing.

The Democratic move to push the measure past a procedural hurdle failed 52-47 with all 50 Republicans opposing the move, leaving Democrats 13 votes short of the 60 votes they had needed to prevail.

Republicans said they would withhold support for the measure unless Democrats agreed to votes on an amendment stopping the administration from lifting Title 42.

In response to the move by the Republicans, Psaki said, “What is important right now is they are using this to hold hostage funding for COVID -- COVID funding that we need in order to buy pills to help immunocompromised, to help those to ensure we can reboot our uninsured program, to make sure we have testing capacity. That's what they are doing.”

“Let's have debates. Let's have discussions. Let's have people come down to the White House, talk about immigration. We all want to fix it. But we need this COVID funding, and it's really a huge disappointed to us that the Congress is left for two weeks without passing this into law.”

US preps for possible surge in border crossings, as officials mull lifting COVID curbs

US officials are preparing for the possibility of thousands of more migrants per day attempting to cross the southern border.

Former president Donald Trump implemented the order at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. His administration claimed the order was to help prevent the spread of the virus across the US' borders with Mexico and Canada.

However, health experts, immigrant rights advocates and leading Democrats argue that scientific evidence does not support its stated goal of helping to stop the spread of the virus.

Biden’s move to lift the policy sparked praise from civil rights organizations and many Democrats, but also criticism from Republicans and some moderate Democrats who assert the administration does not have enough of a plan to handle the expected spike in migrants at the border.

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