The committee voted 12-10 to advance the bill to the Senate. Graham, the committee chairman, said he is usually reluctant to send a bill to the Senate floor without input from Democrats, but that in the case of the so-called Secure and Protect Act, it must be done.
Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., called the move "unprecedented" and said there was no point in forcing the bill through committee because it is "partisan immigration legislation that has no chance of becoming law." The bill would never pass with Democrats holding a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, she said.
"The Secure and Protect Act does not enjoy broad support and what's worse, it will increase problems at the border," she said. "I am so disappointed that Republicans have chosen to break the committee rules and the Senate rules in order to force the bill through the committee."
Last week, Graham had accused Democrats of manipulating a quorum rule requiring at least two members of the minority party to conduct business to avoid voting on his bill. Only one Democrat, Feinstein, attended last week's meeting.
Democrats had requested that the bill be held over until the committee's next meeting after Congress' August recess. But Graham pressed forward with it on Thursday after Republicans deemed it held over from last week's meeting, making it eligible for a vote.
Graham told the committee his bill was much needed to abate the crisis on the southern border without separating families and without releasing them into the interior of the U.S. before their asylum claims have been granted. He noted that there is a backlog of over 900,000 cases in the immigration courts, and the U.S. does not have the resources to detain more immigrants.
"I'm sorry we could not reach an agreement on a broader package," he said. "I don't want the committee to become irrelevant. For seven weeks, I tried the best I know how to find a breakthrough and I was unable."
Feinstein said that breaking the rules to push the bill through would set bad precedent and "denigrate this committee and the institution of the Senate."
"This is not the Senate I joined in 1993," she said.
Introduced on May 15, the Secure and Protect Act of 2019 would block Central Americans from applying for asylum at the border, instead requiring them to apply at processing centers in the so-called Northern Triangle and in Mexico, according to Graham.
The bill would also allow unaccompanied minors from non-neighboring countries to be returned home swiftly if they fail an initial screening for credible fear of persecution or torture if they are returned home, as is the case for unaccompanied children from Mexico and Canada.
It also would allow families to be held in immigration detention together for 100 days, up from the current maximum of 20. That 20-day limit on child detention was handed down by a California federal court as part of a long-running class action known as Flores, which set standards of care for migrant kids in government custody.
Further, the proposed bill calls for the hiring of 500 additional immigration judges to clear out the lengthy immigration court backlog, which keeps asylum applicants waiting years to have their claims decided. There are currently about 400 immigration judges, who are housed under the U.S. Department of Justice's Executive Office for Immigration Review.
The bill won support from Kevin McAleenan, acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, who said the plan would slash migration levels by up to 90%, "end the crisis" at the border and "break the back" of smuggling organizations.
But 154 immigrant advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International, signed a letter Wednesday coming out against the bill.
"The bill would not resolve the current humanitarian crisis at the border; instead, it would foreclose lifesaving protection and subject children as young as toddlers to prolonged and harmful incarceration," their letter to Graham and Feinstein states. "Even worse, the bill fails to address the root causes of the problems leading so many to flee in the first instance."
--Additional reporting by Suzanne Monyak and Andrew Kragie. Editing by Bruce Goldman.
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