Speaker Johnson pushes Biden on border shift in White House meeting

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson pressed President Joe Biden on Wednesday to recast U.S. immigration policy during a meeting with lawmakers at the White House about funding for Ukraine.
Republicans in Congress have blocked emergency funding that Biden has requested for Ukraine and threaten to force a partial shutdown of the government in an effort to push new security policies along the U.S.-Mexico border. They blame Biden’s policies for an influx of immigrants into the United States.
Johnson said after the meeting that he told Biden the United States needed substantive policy change on immigration and called the situation at the border a “national security and humanitarian catastrophe.”
Republicans have hammered Biden over immigration and the issue has become a flashpoint in the 2024 presidential election. Biden, a Democrat, is expected to face Republican Donald Trump, an immigration hard-liner who is his party’s presidential front-runner, in the November election.
There were 10.5 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States in 2021, according to the Pew Research Center. Politicians on both sides of the U.S. political aisle have been trying to reform what they call a broken system for decades, with no success.