WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats prepared Tuesday to whack $1 billion from President Obama’s emergency spending request for the border, while leaving out policy changes Republicans have demanded as their price for agreeing to any money. The developments pointed to a hardening stalemate over the crisis in south Texas with lawmakers preparing to leave Washington for their annual summer recess at the end of next week.

Legislation being finalized by Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., would spend $2.7 billion for more immigration judges, detention facilities and other resources for the southern border, where unaccompanied kids are arriving by the tens of thousands from Central America. It also would include $225 million for Israel’s Iron Dome, designed to intercept short-range rockets and mortars, as Israel battles Hamas militants, and $615 million to fight wildfires raging in the West.

“The United States has an obligation to help resolve these crises but is running out of money,” Mikulski said in a statement late Tuesday. “The costs are real and urgent. We don’t save money by refusing to act or through delay.”

Yet the money for wildfires and for Israel appeared unlikely to sweeten the deal enough for Republicans to swallow it absent legal changes to allow the Central American kids to be turned around fast at the border and sent back home.

“We insist on having the 2008 law repealed as part of it and they’re not willing to do that,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

Said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas: “Unfortunately, it looks like we’re on a track to do absolutely nothing.”

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Senate aides said the smaller spending bill, which could come to the floor to a vote next week, aimed to include enough money to handle the border crisis through the end of this calendar year amid pleas from Homeland Security Department officials who say overwhelmed agencies will be running out of money in coming months. Mikulski said she would formally unveil the legislation Wednesday.

“Based on a review of what is needed in calendar year 2014 to meet needs at the border, the bill reduces the president’s request by $1 billion,” Mikulski said.

But in a conference call with governors from across the U.S., Obama and top officials said Congress needs “to fully fund our supplemental request,” the White House said, warning that inaction would soon render border agents and immigration courts unable to do their jobs.

More than 57,000 kids have arrived since October, mostly from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.


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