The House on Thursday afternoon voted down the first of two Republican bills under consideration for bolstering border security and introducing immigration reforms as enough Republicans joined all Democrats in opposing the measure.
After the defeat of the first bill, House Republican leaders postponed a vote until at least Friday on similar legislation that was considered a compromise within the party. Before the vote on the first bill, President Trump early on Thursday in a tweet questioned the purpose of voting on either bill given that in the Senate, the legislation lacked support from Democrats who could prevent it from becoming law.
The Securing America’s Future Act (H.R. 4760) was defeated 193 to 231, with 41 Republicans joining 190 Democrats in voting no. The bill was sponsored by Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Michael McCaul, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. Some Republicans such at Rep. Steve King (Iowa) rejected the measure for being too soft on immigration, while Rep. Will Hurd (Texas), believes the focus on the physical barriers is antiquated and is too harsh on immigration.
Both bills would authorize about $25 billion to build physical barriers along portions of the nation’s southern border. In addition, the bills also authorized various types of technology—including surveillance systems, tunnel detection sensors, unmanned aircraft systems, maritime patrol aircraft, aircraft detection systems, and a range of other sensors and platforms—to be used for border security and coastal surveillance applications on the northern and southern borders.
President Trump wants Congress to appropriate all $25 billion at once to build the physical barriers on the southern border but so far there is not appetite for that. On Thursday morning, the Senate Appropriations Committee completed its markup of the fiscal year 2019 spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security, setting aside $1.6 billion for additional fencing and related infrastructure to be built on the border.
The committee vote in favor of the DHS spending bill was 26 to five, with opposition coming from some Democrats. Overall, the appropriations bill, which must still be voted by the Senate and then reconciled with homeland security appropriations legislation that House appropriators have yet to markup, recommends $48.3 billion in discretionary spending for DHS.
At our deadline on Thursday, it was unclear whether the second border security bill, the Border Security and Immigration Reform Act (H.R. 6136), would come up for a vote on Friday. The legislation was introduced earlier this week by Goodlatte, McCaul, and Reps. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) and Jeff Denham (R-Calif.).
Both bills also call for DHS to develop an implementation plan for a congressionally-mandated biometric exit system to better monitor the departure of foreign nationals from the U.S. in accordance with their visas. A biometric entry system for foreign nationals already exists at U.S. ports of entry and DHS has been evaluating face recognition technology at a number of airports for departing international flights.
On Thursday, Orlando International Airport inaugurated the full deployment of its biometric exit system at 30 departure gates for all international flights, the first airport-wide deployment in the U.S. of the exit system. In addition to using face recognition for all departing flights, all arriving travelers on international flights now have their faces automatically checked by camera technology to help process their entry into the U.S.
The DHS component Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is managing the biometric exit system and is relying on airports and airlines to pay for the camera systems to be used at departure gates. CBP is managing the backend infrastructure that matches the facial images for each departing international flight.
CBP is evaluating the face recognition technology for biometric exit at 13 U.S. airports. The agency said the recognition verification takes less than two seconds and provides a 99 percent matching rate.
CBP also said it is using face recognition for arrival processing at 10 locations, including four preclearance locations overseas.