A long-awaited immigration bill that immigrant rights advocates feared would be a devastating blow to asylum-seekers has been voted down in the U.S. Senate. The bill came at the heels of an escalating border control issue on the Texas-Mexico border, where Texas is attempting to supersede the federal authority of border patrol. Many expected the bill to be dead on arrival due to a lack of support from Republican lawmakers.

“Immigrant youth of United We Dream know that this draconian, anti-immigrant supplemental bill goes completely in the wrong direction,” said Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, the deputy director of federal advocacy at United We Dream, ahead of the vote. “Senate leadership and the Biden administration are cowering to MAGA Republicans who are using immigrants as political pawns to grow their right-wing base.”

Macedo do Nascimento says a deal would have closed the borders to those most vulnerable and increased detention and deportations, all while using immigrants as trade-offs for war overseas. 

“This is a false choice,” Macedo do Nascimento said. “We can be a country that welcomes newcomers with dignity, protects migrants who’ve called the U.S. home for decades, and actually invests in what helps people live and thrive.”

The supplemental funding bill asked for an additional $118 billion that included record amounts of detention beds and Border Patrol agents, changes to the country’s asylum policies, funds for the war in Ukraine, and for Israel’s military siege on Gaza. Senators are now considering voting on another bill that would grant funding for Ukraine without the sections on immigration.

“Congress should use this moment to reset the terms of negotiation and continue the work to reform all aspects of our failed immigration laws until they’re successful; it is the right thing to do and foundational transformations require legislation,” Todd Schulte, president of Fwd.us, a bipartisan political organization said in a statement. “And, the President should never hesitate to take the steps within his authority to build legal pathways that create an orderly and secure border, as well as provide relief for long-term undocumented immigrants who have made this country their home for decades.”

The bill also created emergency authority that would have allowed the Department of Homeland Security to shut down the border if 4,000 or more migrants crossed on average over seven days. The border would have shut down if those encounters reached a seven-day average of 5,000 or if they exceeded 8,500 in a single day.

“You have folks that are fleeing situations that are life or death,” Hidalgo said. “We know that the deterrence just doesn’t work. So when you create these artificial walls when you create these procedural barriers, that doesn’t stop folks. The human spirit is stronger than that, and folks still come. You’re going to create a market for this community that will be preyed upon by cartels by smugglers.”

The provisions were aimed at reducing the record-high number of crossings at the southern border, but the GOP’s infighting surrounding the deal meant that it couldn’t amass the support needed to pass the Senate. Republican senators had mobilized against the deal at the behest of former President Donald Trump, who is reportedly planning to wield chaos at the border as a political tool against President Joe Biden in the 2024 election.

The failed bill also would have changed the standards for “credible fear” during asylum claim interviews. Migrants with criminal histories would have been disqualified, and officers would have had to consider whether asylum-seekers and immigrants could relocate within their own country or if they lived safely in a third country before trying to cross into the U.S.

As politicians argued about the bill, Customs and Border Patrol announced another migrant death on Feb. 6 in the Tijuana River on the U.S. side of the border in San Ysidro, California. According to local reporting, the man was found and pronounced dead by the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department along a canal near two open-air detention sites. This marks the third death since Oct. 11, when a 29-year-old woman from Guinea was found dead. A second death, a man also from Guinea, occurred in the same area on Nov. 17.  

The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and other organizations on the ground have raised concerns about the conditions that cause continuous suffering in the absence of an orderly system for people to safely seek asylum. According to volunteers providing humanitarian aid at a detention site called Whiskey 8, on the day of this most recent death, more than 100 people waited for over 10 hours between the border walls, soaked and without any protection from a powerful storm flooding local rivers.

“While Senators debate eviscerating the asylum process with cruel and unnecessary immigration policies as a trade-off for funding genocide abroad, we continue to see how those same policies lead to deaths of migrants seeking asylum,” said Pedro Rios, the director of AFSC’s U.S.-Mexico Border Program. “President Biden must commit to protecting the asylum process, permitting migrants to safely seek asylum at the ports instead of relying on Border Patrol agents to force people to wait at open-air detention sites, exposing them to dangers and death.”

Human Rights Watch also issued a statement before the vote calling for a humane, orderly system at the border. A Human Rights Watch representative said that while the bill contained some good provisions, such as giving the government discretion to provide counsel for unaccompanied children in immigration proceedings, it also bargained with the lives of people seeking safety by gutting many asylum protections, by authorizing “summary removals” of asylum-seekers without access to judicial review when certain numbers of people cross the border irregularly, automatically returning them to danger.

“President Biden and Congress can and should do better than this,” said Vicki B. Gaubeca, associate U.S. immigration and border policy director at Human Rights Watch. “The Biden administration should stop following punitive models involving locking people up and summarily expelling them, which have proven to be both ineffective and harmful. Instead, the administration should scrap a deterrence-only approach and invest in good border governance by creating and expanding safe pathways to migrate, along with humane processes at ports of entry that respect the rights and dignity of everyone arriving at the border.”