US Congress approves $4.6bn in emergency border funding
US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has bowed to pressure from Republicans as Congress approved $4.6 billion in emergency aid to address the migrant crisis along the US-Mexico border, sending the bill to President Donald Trump for his signature.
On Thursday, a day after the Senate approved the measure, the House of Representatives, which is led by Democrats, followed suit with a bipartisan vote of 305 to 102.
Seventy-one out of 235 House Democrats voted against the Senate-passed emergency aid bill.
Democrats abandoned efforts to add additional migrant protections for migrant children after they failed to move the needle due to a veto threat by the White House.
Both the White House and the Senate opposed the changes the House had proposed.
"At the end of the day, we have to make sure that the resources needed to protect the children are available," Pelosi told Democrats before the vote.
The lower chamber of Congress voted 230-195 on Tuesday to pass an earlier version of the measure but Trump vowed to veto the House legislation. The Trump administration said it would restrict the president’s policy to curb illegal immigration at the southern border.
On May 1, Trump requested the aid for programs that accommodate record numbers of Central American families seeking asylum in the United States.
Over 300 migrant children were discovered last week in an overcrowded border patrol station in Texas, where they said some had been held for weeks in filthy conditions without adequate food and water.
The discovery led acting commissioner of the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency, John Sanders, to announce his resignation on Tuesday.
Democrats emphasized on Tuesday that while they were approving the border aid to address the humanitarian crisis, they were not ratifying the administration’s attempts to restrict and discourage immigration, which Trump has made a central focus of his presidency.
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