Politico

McALLEN, Texas — The Biden administration’s plan to build new barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border in South Texas calls for a “movable” design that frustrates both environmentalists and advocates of stronger border enforcement.

The plans for the nearly 20 miles of new barrier in Starr County were made public in September when the federal government sought public input. The following month, the administration waived 26 federal laws protecting the environment and certain species to speed up the construction process.

“The United States Border Patrol did not ask for this downgraded border wall,” Rodney Scott, a former U.S. Border Patrol chief said.

Construction is moving forward despite President Joe Biden’s campaign promise not to build more wall and amid an increase in migrants coming to the nation’s southern border from across Latin America and other parts of the world to seek asylum. Illegal crossings topped 2 million for the second year in a row for the government’s budget year that ended Sept. 30.

People such as Scott who want more border security believe the barriers won’t be strong enough to stop people from crossing illegally. Environmentalists, meanwhile, say the design actually poses a greater risk to animal habitat than former President Donald Trump’s border wall.

Biden has defended the administration’s decision by saying he had to use the Trump-era funding for it. The law requires the funding for the new barriers to be used as approved and for the construction to be completed in 2023.

Most barriers on the border were erected in the last 20 years under Trump and former President George W. Bush. Those sections of border wall include Normandy-style fencing that resembles big X’s and bollard-style fencing made of upright steel posts.

Biden’s barrier will be much shorter than the 18- to 30-foot concrete-filled steel bollard panels of Trump’s wall. It also could be temporary.

An example of the style of barrier his administration will use can be seen in Brownsville, about 100 miles southeast of Starr County. Metal bollards embedded into 4-foot-high cement blocks that taper toward the top sit along the southern part of a neighborhood not far from the curving Rio Grande.

Over the last year, the Rio Grande Valley region was the fourth-busiest area for the number of people crossing into the U.S. illegally, though it was the busiest in previous years.

With the design planned for Starr County, federal border agents will be able to move around the fencing, said Democratic U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, who represents Starr County. “So it’s one of those things where if they want to direct traffic, they can move it.”

Scott agreed that the “moveable” fences can be used as an emergency stopgap measure to block off access in some areas. But he warned that if the fencing isn’t placed far enough into the ground, someone might be able to use a vehicle to shove it out of the way, provided they don’t mind damaging the vehicle.

Laiken Jordahl, a conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, said mountain lions, bobcats, javelinas, coyotes, white-tail deer, armadillos, jack rabbits, ground squirrels, and two endangered, federally protected plants — Zapata bladderpod and prostrate milkweed — may be affected.

Jordahl said the design the Biden administration is using “will block even the smallest species of animals from passing through the barrier.”

“The one advantage for making it shorter is, I guess if somebody falls while they’re climbing over it, they aren’t falling as far,” Scott Nicol, a board member of the Friends of the Wildlife Corridor, said.

Nicol, who lives in the Rio Grande Valley, is familiar with the type of barriers Biden’s administration will use, the terrain, and the weather in Starr County. He is concerned about unintended consequences, particularly on the Rio Grande that separates U.S. and Mexico.

“You know, if Starr County gets hit by a big rainstorm and the water has to drain into the river, these walls — whether it’s the bollard walls or the Jersey barrier walls — are going to block the movement of that water and dam it up,” Nicol said.

Last month, the Center for Biological Diversity along with about 100 other organizations sent the U.S. government a letter pleading for reconsideration of environmental protection laws. To date, they have not received an answer.

In the days after Democrats saw a series of wins in statewide elections, Biden aides are drumming home the point that the polls don’t matter and voters love the administration’s agenda.

But nobody in the administration seems more focused on rebutting negative polling these days than President Joe Biden.

At a fundraiser Thursday night in Chicago, Biden told donors that while “the press has been talking about two polls … there are 10 other polls we’re winning,” according to a pool report. He added that the campaign had placed copies of those polls on attendees’ seats.

Speaking to reporters at Maryland’s Joint Base Andrews earlier that day before taking off for Chicago, Biden commented that reporters “don’t read the polls.”

“Ten polls. Eight of them I’m beating him in those states. Eight of them. You guys only do two, CNN and New York Times,” Biden continued, before adding that he didn’t think he was really losing to former President Donald Trump and other potential GOP rivals in key battleground states.

The president’s remarks come after Democrats on Tuesday regained control of the Virginia House of Delegates and held onto the governorship in ruby-red Kentucky, despite Biden’s underwater approval ratings in both states. It also came after Republicans spent $30 million in Kentucky attempting to tie Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear to Biden and make the gubernatorial election a referendum on the administration’s performance.

Recent polls from CNN and the New York Times suggest the president is trailing Trump and other Republican hopefuls nationally by four and five points respectively. The Times poll also found that Biden was trailing Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada.

Biden aides have taken Tuesday’s elections as an opportunity to defend the administration’s record and emphasize the popularity of Biden’s policies in television appearances and in press gaggles.

Aboard Air Force One on Thursday, White House principal deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton told reporters “polls don’t matter; elections matter. You know, and now we’ve seen three resounding outcomes — in 2020, in 2022, and in 2023.”

“Voters have repeatedly embraced the president’s policies, which put middle-class Americans first and end generations of trickle-down economics that didn’t deliver for the American people,” Dalton said.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre echoed much of the same on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Thursday: “We have said, it’s not about the polls. It’s about the people.”

“The American people spoke loudly and pretty consistently about this,” she said. “They did in 2020 and 2022. They said this past Tuesday that the president’s values and agenda are incredibly popular across the country.”

The message fits into Biden-world’s bigger efforts to quell bed-wetting within the party, the media and its own ranks about the president’s reelection chances and reconcile the discrepancy between the polls and Democrats’ promising electoral results.

When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Biden’s campaign directed POLITICO to a memo they sent to media outlets earlier this week that highlights eight national polls from the last three weeks showing Biden ahead of Trump and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or tied with Trump. It also addressed the “‘hair-on-fire’, ‘sky-is-falling’ tone we’ve seen from media coverage over the last few days.”

“There’s no doubt this will be a very close election,” campaign communications director Michael Tyler wrote in the memo. “Joe Biden has been counted out time and time again and proved pollsters and pundits wrong. His campaign is ignoring the noise and building the strong campaign it needs to win — just like in 2020.”

Amid news of vast in-house dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s Israel-Palestine policies, Washington is getting all the umbrage and sense of betrayal that accompanies a leaked internal divide — but none of the benefits that flow from a strenuous public debate.

Consider the fallout from my colleague Nahal Toosi’s report this week about State Department staffers signing a formal dissent cable. The political reaction was a pretty good Rorschach test of America’s ideological divide.

On the far left, the dissenters were heroes, bravely speaking out against an immoral American position. On the far right, they were deep-state scoundrels, an example of the bureaucratic sabotage that will be rooted out in a second Donald Trump presidency.

And to the Biden administration, they were … well, not much at all.

Reached for comment, officials merely referred to a spokesman’s old statements about how dissent is part of the process and higher-ups welcome opinions from staff. It wasn’t so different from the official reaction to the slew of other recent reports about staff fury over the Gaza war in various institutions of political Washington: No nastygrams or firings, but no concessions, either.

It’s a posture that’s well in keeping with the standard, responsible Washington view on what’s supposed to happen when the worker bees disagree with the bosses on a matter of policy. They deserve to get their say, but don’t have to get their way.

But now, a month into the biggest foreign policy divide since the rise of social media, Slack and other newfangled tools that empower unhappy underlings, it’s not clear whether sticking to the process is enough — either for the folks who agree with the dissenters, or the ones who think a president should toss them out on their ears.

Here’s the short version of the longstanding Beltway moral consensus on speaking out: Resigning on principle is admirable. Sticking around and subverting a policy from within is bad. Disagreeing as part of the process is noble. Making a spectacle of yourself while you’re still on the payroll is tawdry.

By that standard, there’s a rough Washington hierarchy of the highest-profile federal-paycheck dissents against the administration’s decision to aggressively back Israel’s war against Hamas:

The resignation of Josh Paul, the State Department official who quit last month to protest a policy “that I believe to be shortsighted, destructive, unjust, and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse” — good. He decided he couldn’t support a policy, and dealt with the consequences, including losing his paycheck.

The dissent-channel memo POLITICO reported this week, in which numerous Department staffers declared that “when Israel supports settler violence and illegal land seizures or employs excessive use of force against Palestinians, we must communicate publicly that this goes against our American values so that Israel does not act with impunity” — also good. The whole point of the dissent process is to allow professionals to register differences of opinion without being punished, something that can help a bureaucracy avoid mistakes born of group-think.

The open letter from hundreds of Jewish and Muslim Capitol Hill staffers who cited “the Palestinian civilians who are enduring catastrophic suffering at the hands of the Israeli government” and called for a cease-fire — not so good. The signatories, who as congressional employees can be sacked for speaking out, didn’t actually attach their own names, which lent it a pusillanimous air. Even more important from the credentials-obsessed Beltway establishment point of view, it made it unclear whether these were bona fide experts or just folks whose jobs gave them the chance to tweak their employers.

The Axios scoop this week about junior State Department official Sylvia Yacoub, who emailed colleagues in search of signatures for a dissent cable but also used her personal X account to assail Biden as “complicit in genocide” and Vice President Kamala Harris as “embarrassingly out of touch” — lousy. The social-media political broadsides look unprofessional, undercutting the disagreement with administration policy. (After Axios contacted her, Yacoub, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, made her tweets private.)

The common denominator of all these judgments is the notion that principled policy complaints should involve private conversations between professionals.

That’s an idea that was much more suited to an age before technology allowed dissenters to gather in-house support via bulk texts and forwarded emails — and before their protests were able to quickly become part of a roiling social-media conversation involving the general public as well as the bigwigs who make policy.

In 2023, on the other hand, the sense that large numbers of foreign affairs professionals and other government insiders are unhappy with American policy on the Gaza war has become part of the news in real-time, with reports of listening sessions for mutinous White House and State Department staffers.

In part because Biden has done the right thing — it’s good organizational management to hear out serious dissenters and not demonize them — the current collision between a professional culture of discretion and a social media culture of publicity makes for a weird and opaque sort of news, goosing everyone’s suspicions and not doing much to enlighten.

If you’re inclined to view the Washington bureaucracy as a hotbed of disloyalists, your fears are confirmed. And if you’re inclined to see the Biden administration as riding roughshod over the pros in the name of politics, those fears are confirmed, too.

The odd, semi-public nature of the Israel-Hamas war internal disagreement has been a long time coming. During the Trump years, a series of florid, morally driven resignation letters from diplomats and career public servants became public. Some 1,000 State Department employees also signed a formal dissent cable against the ban on travel from seven Muslim countries.

It’s the sort of crowd that would have been impossible when the dissent channel was first established 50 years ago, at a time when you pretty much had to be in the same place to organize such a memo — meaning smaller cohorts of signatories and less likelihood of going public. (Not that it always kept things mum: The original dissent cable, the famous 1971 “Blood Telegram” from a small group of U.S. diplomats who objected to American support for a brutal Pakistani military crackdown at their post in what is now Bangladesh, eventually made it into the press, enraging Richard Nixon.)

Nowadays, meanwhile, internal critics can be one leak (or one tweet) away from being household names — a status that provides a platform to call out wrongheaded policies, but also enables opponents to deride critics as publicity seekers.

One of the big Foreign Service resignations of the Trump era was John Feeley, a 30-year diplomat then serving as ambassador to Panama. After Charlottesville, he determined that he could not serve under the then president. “I signed an oath to serve faithfully the president and his administration in an apolitical fashion, even when I might not agree with certain policies,” he wrote in a resignation letter. “My instructors made clear that if I believed I could not do that, I would be honor bound to resign. That time has come.”

The letter made huge news when it became public. But Feeley hadn’t meant for it to become an event. “I resigned, intending to go out quietly,” he told me. But the letter was leaked, he says, by political appointees who wanted to show the world “that there was a deep state at State.” Even though a lot of the ensuing coverage treated him as a hero, the episode had a nasty edge about it.

Feeley didn’t quit over a specific policy disagreement, and only spoke out once his letter had leaked and he was a private citizen. He said this week that when it comes to folks still on the job, keeping dissent in the family is the best way to make an impact. “It has all the effectiveness of a fart in a hurricane,” he said of Yacoub’s social media posts. “When you’re doing what she did, which is openly advocating against policy, and you still collect a paycheck.”

Paul, who posted his resignation letter last month in response to the American policy on the Israel-Hamas war, said he was nonetheless surprised at how far and how fast it spread. (He’d posted it on LinkedIn, “which is not exactly known for going viral.”) When it landed, the outreach was immediate, an “overwhelming response from colleagues from around the world, both inside the State Department and across government, including on the Hill and Department of Defense and elsewhere. … They just said that they support the stance I’ve taken. They are finding this issue immensely difficult to deal with in terms of its emotional toll, in terms of their disagreement with policies that have been pursued both by the administration and by Congress. And, in some cases just reaching out asking for counseling.”

When I asked about how the spotlight shapes the impact of dissent from within the ranks, Paul also talked about the internal reasoning behind the idea of going through proper channels. “I don’t think it is necessarily helpful for public attention to be paid to, specifically, the State Department dissent channel because that is supposed to be an internal forum for dissent. And when it goes public, and when it is politicized, as particularly the Afghan dissent cable was last summer, I think that disincentivizes people from joining the same cables, and I think it also makes the administration take the content of those cables less seriously.”

But in a fast-moving crisis, “public dissent is also important” in pushing change that an administration might otherwise avoid via the bureaucratic rope-a-dope of listening sessions and town halls and offers of emotional support to unhappy staff. It’s just that, as Paul learned in walking away from a stable job, it comes with consequences.

In a Trump presidency, of course, there might have been another very real consequence both for the folks who speak out publicly and the ones who go through proper channels: The very real possibility of a presidential social media attack on the critics as pro-terrorist or anti-American or otherwise deserving of whatever the trolls could send their way.

That’s not Biden’s move, to his credit. But in reading Paul’s resignation or the dissent cable, I wonder whether it would be better for the administration to actually engage with the sorts of criticism being leveled by its own staff.

Right now, the most attention-getting skepticism about the administration’s full embrace of the Israel-Hamas war comes from people who accuse Biden of genocide — and takes place against a backdrop where a fair number of activists have tiptoed toward excusing Hamas. By contrast, the internal dissenters who have made news this month were appalled by Hamas’ brutality and largely focused on America’s own national interests, values and credibility, the sort of hard-headed conversations that are largely missing in the social media fray. It’s not to say that they’re right, just that it might be more edifying for the country than the one-sided exchange between team Biden and a crowd of angry sloganeers.

“I mean, obviously, I’m biased — I spent 30 years in the organization,” Feeley said. “But they’re really good debates. … One of the things I think that you can say about people who, one, join the Department of State and two, who dissent, is that they tend to be people who are very comfortable living in a world of gray. They can hold two opposing thoughts at the same time. And they can see the validity in both of them. And you know, at the end of the day, sometimes you can’t do both of them. So you gotta come down on one side, and that’s where some of the nastiest fights take place.”

President Joe Biden and United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain are scheduled to meet in Illinois on Thursday, the White House said, the latest show of unity between the president and the union, though it has so far held off endorsing his reelection.

The White House said Tuesday that the meeting will take place in Belvidere, where Stellantis agreed to reopen a stalled plant and add additional jobs as part of the tentative contract deal between the UAW and the company late last month.

The UAW also has tentative deals with General Motors and Ford.

Biden showed historic support for the UAW and its demands during the union’s six-week strike, which ended last week pending ratification of the contract offers by autoworkers. Still, the UAW has yet to endorse Biden, making it something of an outlier among the biggest labor unions.

In Illinois, Biden will deliver remarks touting gains in the deals the UAW won, as well as his economic and pro-union policies, according to the White House. He will also meet with other UAW members and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, the White House said.

A spokesperson for Stellantis declined to comment on the White House’s announcement.

Biden made history as the first sitting president to join workers at the picket line, when he stood alongside striking UAW members and Fain in September. Biden took a particular interest in the shuttering of the Belvidere plant, and in June met with the head of Illinois-based UAW Local 1268, which represents the plant, POLITICO previously reported.

In late August, Joe Biden’s reelection campaign announced a massive ad buy to run on television and online in key battleground states.

The spots focused on everything from the president’s roots in Scranton, Pa., to his bipartisan achievements in office. The one subject rarely mentioned is former President Donald Trump.

All told, Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee spent roughly $7 million on positive TV ads this year, according to the ad tracking firm AdImpact, along with less than $100,000 on contrast ads that name Trump. Those numbers did not capture all ads, including digital and Spanish-language ones that attack Trump or Republicans in general. But the larger trend was indisputable.

The president’s team made a calculation earlier this year to prioritize bolstering Biden’s image versus attacking Trump’s in paid advertising, according to White House aides, a number of Democratic strategists and a top Biden campaign donor. Among the reasons: They figured the ex-president’s GOP primary rivals would do much of the work of roughing him up for them.

That bet has so far not paid off. Trump has largely skated through the primary without being attacked by his opponents. And Biden’s numbers have not budged.

Recently, some on the president’s team have begun revisiting the strategy. Several prominent Democrats close to the campaign, granted anonymity to speak more freely about internal operations, said discussions are taking place among Biden brass about how much to prioritize positive campaigning over negative. And allies are calling directly for a more aggressive approach.

“This is not a regular election,” said Rev. Al Sharpton, an MSNBC host who is close to officials in Biden’s orbit. “This is not just about a candidate’s record. It is about a former president who has four criminal indictments and a civil case against him who has said he would terminate the Constitution. This is about what is acceptable to our norms, this is about protecting our democracy itself. It has to be made clear what a threat Trump poses.”

Sharpton said he shared that sentiment with Biden’s team and the DNC.

Biden campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz said that there has been no shift in their advertising plans: “There is no change in strategy.” He added that “if folks are confused” about their approach, they should read a recent memo released by their team.

Biden campaign officials added that their advertising roadmap has always been to start by reintroducing the president to voters, touting his accomplishments, and laying the groundwork to turn their firepower on the GOP nominee next year. They stressed that they have attacked Trump in other arenas, such as through earned media and surrogate operations.

“We still believe in the strategy of highlighting the president’s accomplishments,” said a Biden campaign official.

The campaign officials said that their approach allows them to test their ads to see which are the most effective, experiment to determine the best platforms, and fine-tune their paid messages. And they said that the GOP primary is demonstrating that Trump and other Republican candidates are extreme and support unpopular positions.

Concerns about the Biden campaign’s approach escalated this week among Democrats after a series of polls showed Biden trailing Trump in critical battleground states. Former Barack Obama adviser David Axelrod questioned whether the president is the right person to head the ticket at all. Others said the campaign needs to focus on contrasting Biden with Trump.

But the idea of making the election more about Biden’s predecessor than Biden himself remains hotly debated. One national Democratic strategist close to the campaign said it’s imperative that the campaign do everything in its power to make voters aware of what Biden’s done in office.

“It’d be a big mistake to not lay that out because awareness of his accomplishments are low, but [their] popularity is high,” the person said. “I think what you have to do is find the right mix of positive and negative ads.”

Still, concerns are mounting among major donors and Democrats close to the White House, chiefly around Biden’s monthslong struggle to sell his economic record. One donor said the campaign erred in calculating that once voters understood the president’s accomplishments, his approval ratings would go up

“Well, we spent all this time trying to explain all the good things he did, the bipartisan stuff he did, and it hasn’t boosted his numbers. So maybe we ought to go to plan B at this point,” the person said, adding, “I know a lot of people are pissed” because the campaign hasn’t hit Trump harder.

In particular, Democrats are torn over the administration’s decision to brand the economic recovery as a result of “Bidenomics.” Officials have yet to figure out a way to allay Americans’ frustration over rising prices, even after months of evidence that inflation has cooled. And there is growing fear that the sales job may never work.

“I can never remember people being unhappy in any economy where they can get a job,” said Jeffrey Gural, a real estate developer and longtime Democratic donor. “I think the problem Biden has is there’s so much noise out there criticizing him.”

Officials in the Biden administration and on the campaign have largely dismissed the angst over Biden’s economic numbers, arguing that it’s still early in the 2024 cycle and most voters are not yet paying close attention to the presidential race. Some aides believe that once voters start listening to Trump again, they will be turned off by his incendiary rhetoric and vows of vengeance against rivals.

They also contend that the polling is misleading, citing economic measures like strong consumer spending that indicate people are confident about their own financial situation, and that Biden’s standing will improve as voters begin to weigh his policies versus Trump’s.

“First of all, I don’t think the house is on fire,” said Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.). “His thing is to continue to sell and to push his programs, the public policies that he wants. He needs to be more assertive with the Republican majority here in the House that are essentially Trump’s mouthpiece on public policy. I think that’s an area in which he can be stronger.”

But some Democrats are concerned the campaign’s current setup is not helping the president. In particular, there is simmering frustration over a perceived dearth of outside surrogates in the economic and business community that can be called on to promote Biden’s accomplishments.

“Right now, it doesn’t really have the surrogate base developed that’s needed,” said Ben Harris, a former senior Treasury Department official who helped shape Biden’s economic agenda. “The way I’ve put it is, Biden is brilliant at governing — and terrible at bragging about it.”

The White House disputed the criticism of its surrogate operation, with an official saying it’s deployed surrogates on more than 300 occasions to do over 1,000 economic interviews since July, though that figure includes both administration officials and outside supporters. The official also said top economic aides stay in regular touch with prominent economists, and that the administration frequently distributes talking points and has worked with outside groups like the progressive think tank Groundwork Collaborative.

For its part, the Biden campaign said it’s relied heavily on the 50 Democratic officials who make up its “national advisory board” to help reinforce its viewpoint in the media, highlighting recent television appearances by board members like Sen. Chris Coons, Rep. Jim Clyburn and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Biden aides concede that very little news has broken through in the last month when the headlines have been dominated by the Israel-Hamas war, though some contend that a loss of support from Muslim Americans may be offset by increased backing from Jewish voters in places like the Philadelphia and Detroit suburbs.

There have also been hints that Biden and his team are starting to recalibrate around that early internal campaign debate and shifting their focus more to Trump.

The campaign linked Trump to the chaos among House Republicans as they sought to elect a new speaker. And those tasked with securing the president a second term believe that Trump’s legal challenges, litany of scandals and MAGA positions — especially on abortion — will alienate swing voters. They’re confident the media’s focus on those legal problems will only accelerate in the months ahead, as court dates approach and especially if a possible conviction looms.

Democrats not working on the campaign but concerned about its status say a more aggressive push on this front would be welcomed.

“They need to frame the race as a choice, not as a referendum,” said Axelrod.

Steve Shepard, Shia Kapos and Nicholas Wu contributed to this report. 

Rep. Rashida Tlaib accused President Joe Biden of supporting genocide in Gaza, warning that voters “won’t forget” his actions at the polls in 2024 in the strongest intraparty rebuke to the president since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war.

In a video posted Friday to X, formerly known as Twitter, Tlaib featured interspersed clips of Biden administration officials expressing support for Israel, videos of dead and injured Palestinians in Gaza and clips from pro-Palestinian protests around the U.S., before closing with a direct message from Tlaib to Biden.

“Mr. President, the American people are not with you on this one,” Tlaib said to the camera at the end of the video.

“Joe Biden supported the genocide of the Palestinian people. The American people won’t forget. Biden, support a ceasefire now or don’t count on us in 2024,” text cards following Tlaib’s video message read.

The Biden administration has backed Israel’s right to defend itself while pushing for pauses in the country’s bombardment of neighboring Gaza to allow humanitarian aid, food and water to reach Palestinians.

Biden has faced mounting pressureto support a cease-fire with the Israeli government’s barrage of attacks killing at least 9,000 Palestinians since war broke out last month, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. More than 1,400 Israelis were killed in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on a music festival and Israeli settlements.

The Biden administration did not reply to a request for comment Saturday morning.

Tlaib — the only Palestinian member of Congress — has faced backlash for her vocal opposition to the Biden administration’s alliance with Israel amid the escalating violence following the deadly Hamas attack.

The Michigan representative last week faced a vote to censure her, helmed by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who claimed that Tlaib participated in an attempted insurrection in a House office building by supporting Jewish protesters demanding a cease-fire. The censure effort failed in a 222-186 vote.

While fellow progressive “squad” members in Congress remained publicly silent on Tlaib’s genocide accusation, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) dodged questions about the video on Friday night, telling CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins that “every member has their own points of view.”

Lee also expressed her support for a cease-fire in Gaza and called on Biden to “speak very clearly about a cease-fire.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) posted Saturday morning that “66% of American voters across all political affiliations support a ceasefire,” likely referring to an Oct. 20 Data for Progress poll.

Thousands of protesters are expected to rally later Saturday in Washington, D.C., to demand a cease-fire in Gaza and a halt to U.S. aid to Israel.

Progressives on Capitol Hill are ramping up pressure on the Biden administration to use its leverage to force Israel to address the growing humanitarian concerns in Gaza.

But while the White House supports a pause in hostilities to address those concerns, Israeli leadership on Friday said it did not.

The tension could very well crest in the days ahead as Congress pushes forward on an ambitious funding request that would, in part, send billions of dollars to Israel.

Over the last few days, several lawmakers have demanded the White House take a tougher stance with its Israeli counterparts. Those lawmakers have called on the administration to push the Israelis to publicly share their plans to ensure civilian safety and address humanitarian issues, such as access to water and fuel, before the United States finalizes additional aid to the country.

“Beyond just a ceasefire, I think it is time for our party to press upon the president to really be a mediating force in what we are seeing in these atrocities in Gaza,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in a brief interview. “It is up to the United States to set that standard.”

The demands to make civilian and humanitarian issues a priority are part of a growing chorus of Democrats who have grown more skittish with Israel’s Gaza campaign as it has progressed. They want to see a pause in the fighting to allow civilians to escape Gaza. President Joe Biden on Wednesday said he supported one.

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday forcefully rejected those calls, saying Israel will continue to bombard the Gaza Strip with “all of its power.”

Netanyahu’s refusal to weigh Washington’s request sets Biden up for a stark political clash between a powerful ally and growing progressive pressure over humanitarian concerns.

“I have huge concerns about the current situation,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.). Along with Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.), he sent the administration a list of questionson the U.S. assessment on civilian deaths, humanitarian needs, how long a war may last and other issues.

“We should push for the values that we uphold, including humanitarian aid and civilians getting out safely and defending civilians against harm during the conflict,” Merkley said.

The clash between the United States and Israel — and the pressure campaign from the left — comes as Congress weighs the Biden administration’s request to send more than $14.3 billion to Israel as part of a nearly $106 billion national security supplemental package. However, lawmakers who have begun openly pressing for a ceasefire or pause in Israel’s Gaza campaign largely believed they missed their opportunity to demand strings be attached to the Israel aid.

The GOP-controlled House voted Thursday to pass a standalone Israel aid package paid for by cuts to IRS funding, making it radioactive to most Democrats. The Senate is putting together a bipartisan proposal that many in the upper chamber hope the House will eventually accept. Lawmakers want to see movement on humanitarian assurances before taking a high-profile vote on the bill, even if they’re not going to demand legislative conditions on the Israel funding.

“The Biden administration has to make certain that the needs of the civilians are being protected. They have a lot of influence over the war plan,” Welch said. “The war plan that Israel has clearly doesn’t take into account the civilian casualties and what’s very worrisome about that is two things — one, civilian deaths, but two, it’s a bad plan. We’ve seen in the past that it just creates more opposition.”

In response to such pressure, administration officials have detailed to lawmakers their “daily” campaign of attempting to hold the Israeli government accountable, and expressing the importance of minimizing civilian casualties and ensuring access to basic needs like water and fuel. And an administration official noted that when the United States transfers weapons to Israel or any other country, it requires that those weapons be used in accordance with the law of armed conflict.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan met with a handful of senators in the White House situation room this week to make that case, according to two attendees who were granted anonymity to speak about the meeting.

“The administration is [pushing] daily — they tell us they’re pushing daily — at every level for a whole series of changes, and I think we’re starting to see some,” Merkley said, recounting recent decisions to turn on water and allow humanitarian trucks to deliver goods.

Other Democratic leaders so far are stopping short of directly calling for a ceasefire. Asked Friday about supporting a ceasefire or a “pause” in the conflict, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries outlined several principles he believed needed to happen — like the defeat of Hamas, the freeing of hostages and the delivery of humanitarian aid — but stressed “how that is managed logistically” was best left to international governments and organizations.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken took the U.S. position on a humanitarian pause directly to Israel on Friday. He told reporters that during a meeting with Netanyahu earlier that day, he urged Israel to pursue a pause in fighting and gave advice about how to minimize Palestinian civilian deaths while targeting Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip.

Shortly after, Netanyahu said Israel “refuses a temporary cease-fire that doesn’t include a return of our hostages.”

Some progressives have called for conditions on Israel aid in the past, most notably, Warren in 2021. But the idea of doing so now, in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks that killed 1,400 Israelis, has gained little ground beyond some of the most progressive lawmakers and stands little chance of passing in either chamber of Congress.

Any kinds of conditions placed on the aid would lose votes from the moderate pro-Israel wing of the Democratic caucus. Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.), for example, voted against the House GOP-led bill Thursday, in part because of the conditions placed upon the aid.

Some Democrats unsuccessfully lobbied the White House shortly before the national security defense supplemental was released in hopes of getting restrictions or additional humanitarian aid added to the original request, said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.).

Now that the funding request is already out, “most of the groups and many members of Congress kind of missed our best chance,” he said, though he added Rep. Barbara Lee’s (D-Calif.) efforts helped increase the amount of humanitarian aid in the initial ask by roughly a billion dollars.

Democrats now find themselves caught between staunchly supporting a U.S. ally with the prospect of perpetuating a bloody military campaign that has faced criticism on moral grounds.

“While I support Israel and Israeli democracy, I have real hesitation in what I’m seeing,” said Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Calif.). “And this [idea of] trust the Israeli government, that they’re being strategic and trying to be careful — Why would I do that? That’s not my job to just trust.”

President Joe Biden plans to skip an upcoming global climate conference in the Middle East and isn’t likely to follow through on his pledge to visit Africa by year’s end, according to two senior administration officials.

Biden is not expected to attend COP28, the U.N.’s climate conference, which begins at the end of the month in Dubai and runs into early December. Neither the trip to Dubai nor Africa had been officially announced by the White House, but there had long been internal discussions and preliminary plans for the president to make both stops.

The senior administration officials, who like others interviewed for this story were granted anonymity to speak freely about private discussions, cautioned that the president’s schedule could change in the weeks ahead. But there are currently no plans for him to travel internationally again for the rest of 2023.

Officials in the United Arab Emirates had expected Biden to attend, according to one person familiar with the conference.

White House aides are balancing demands for the president’s time amid a war in the Middle East that has erupted not far from Dubai. One official said the war is among the factors in deciding the president’s upcoming schedule, but noted that Biden traveled to Tel Aviv last month after the Hamas terror attacks on Israel precipitated the conflict. He also made a secret trip to Ukraine earlier this year amid Russia’s invasion.

There also could be a showdown later this year over government spending that could require Biden to stay in Washington, one of the officials said. The current temporary government spending bill is set to expire Nov. 17 and it is not clear how the new Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, will handle negotiations that could force a government shutdown.

The optics of holding the climate conference in the UAE, a major oil producer, has always been awkward, but dozens of countries plan to use the meeting to push for the world’s first deal to phase out CO2-emitting coal, oil and gas.

Biden attended the first two COP conferences of his term, in 2021 in Scotland and 2022 in Egypt. A year ago, he went to Sharm El-Sheikh on the heels of signing into law the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed sweeping climate change reforms. He has fewer new tangible green accomplishments this year but could still highlight climate change — an issue that polling suggests is important to many young voters and liberal Democrats — less than a year out from standing for reelection.

“President Biden has led and delivered on the most ambitious climate agenda in history, both at home and abroad. Although we don’t have any travel updates to share at this time, the Administration looks forward to a robust and productive COP28,” a White House spokesperson said.

An appearance in Dubai could have provided Biden with a chance to meet with Arab Leaders against the backdrop of the Israel-Hamas war and amid fears the conflict could expand in the region. A planned meeting with some Arab leaders last month in Jordan, scheduled to take place immediately after Biden left Tel Aviv, was canceled after an explosion at a hospital in Gaza.

It also appears unclear whether Biden will follow through on his pledge to become the first U.S. president to set foot on the continent of Africa since Barack Obama’s trip in 2015. At a summit of African nations in Washington last December, Biden vowed to visit this year as part of a recommitment of U.S. interest in the continent, which had seen China and Russia expand their influence in recent years.

White House officials had still been debating as recently as earlier this fall which country Biden would visit — Kenya and South Africa were among the contenders — amid a tumultuous year on the continent that witnessed multiple governments overthrown. They considered having the president go after the G-20 meeting in India in September but the planning — though never official — then shifted to pairing it with the COP visit. An aide stressed that the administration’s commitment to Africa remains unchanged.

White House aides believe that the foreign travel will be very limited next year, as the president plans to focus on domestic trips for his reelection campaign.

Next year’s G-7 summit in Italy and the G-20 in Brazil are possibilities but neither has been finalized, nor has a possible return to India to strengthen ties among the Quad countries — India, Japan, Australia and the U.S. The annual NATO summit will be in Washington next year.

Biden does plan to attend a Pacific states summit later this month that is being held in San Francisco.

Top Biden officials are preparing Democratic lawmakers and immigration policy advocates for the likelihood the administration will have to swallow compromises on asylum law in order for the president’s national security funding request to pass.

In calls with those lawmakers and advocates in recent weeks, officials from the White House and Department of Homeland Security floated potential changes as a means of winning over Republicans opposed to aid for Ukraine, according to four people familiar with the talks.

The outreach illustrates how challenging the coming days will be for the White House as it tries to move a $106 billion supplemental aid package that includes money for Ukraine, Israel, the southern border and Taiwan. Republicans have insisted that any large-scale plan include border policy changes as well. In the process, they have placed a political lighting rod of an issue squarely into the biggest legislative matter before Congress — and forced the White House to balance competing interests.

A former administration official familiar with the discussions, who was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations, said the White House’s openness to asylum reform “was a huge substantive risk, and political one.”

“It could get ugly,” the person added.

While the administration has begun broaching the contours of a possible immigration policy compromise, similar movement is harder to detect on the Hill. Democratic lawmakers have resisted engaging in talks over what concessions they would make before Republicans detail what concrete policy asks they have, even as they express a willingness to talk.

“I think it’s hard to do those things fast, right, without having a whole lot of unnecessary consequences,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.). “But we got to be open to the discussions.”

But in broad strokes, Democrats have also discussed asylum policy changes as a place of possible overlapping legislative interest. Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the Senate Homeland Security Committee chair, said “the process of asylum is clearly something that needs to be looked at,” while Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), another member of Homeland Security, said “the judicial process and the timing” of asylum should be considered.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Thursday emphasized the need for Congress to move forward with Biden’s supplemental request, which the administration views as the best way to manage border security needs.

“We’ve been very clear, if Republicans are serious about dealing with border security, this is something that they should move forward with — easily. Easily. But what we’ve seen them do over and over again is play political games,” she said.

The specific asylum reform that has come up in private conversations with administration officials, according to people familiar with them, is a change to the credible fear standard. Under current law, if a migrant is subject to expedited removal and put through the credible fear process, that person is required to show a “significant possibility” of credible fear of persecution, torture or fear returning to their country. A tweak to the law’s language could in theory mean fewer migrants hitting the credible fear threshold and, therefore, more being denied the opportunity to apply for asylum.

It is unlikely that such a change would placate Republicans, who are floating proposals such as reimplementing Remain in Mexico — a Trump-era policy that forced migrants to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims were processed — alongside other changes to asylum law.

“The second thing we’d like to see is changing the asylum claims standard, where you don’t have 21,000 people claiming asylum every three days. I think those are the two big issues, and there are a lot of other smaller issues that I think are going to come up in negotiations,” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) told POLITICO.

The administration’s move could, moreover, spark blowback among Democrats, including those who have accused the White House of lacking a humane approach to the border and migration. One person familiar with the talks told POLITICO that if the White House moves forward with pushing changes to asylum law without trying to secure progress on something like the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, immigration advocates would likely denounce the deal.

The insertion of immigration policy into the debate around the president’s supplemental request has already proven to be a magnet for elected officials looking for related, peripheral reforms.

A group of Democratic mayors descended Thursday on Washington to meet with White House and DHS officials — including White House chief of staff Jeff Zients and Office of Intergovernmental Affairs director Tom Perez — before later heading to the Hill to meet with Democratic senators. They met with Colorado Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, Illinois Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, Montana Sen. Jon Tester and Independent Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, according to a person familiar with the meeting.

As their cities manage an influx of migrants, they too, are hoping the imperative of passing Ukraine and Israel funding will help them move forward their own immigration asks — not only funding but policy changes that would allow migrants to work. The thinking among the mayors is that a sweet spot for the deal could be around adjusting asylum law in exchange for work authorization, all tied together with Ukraine and Israel funding.

“It’s pretty hard to ignore when both parties in Congress, the White House and mayors from major cities all agree that there needs to be resources and changes with regard to how we manage migration,” said another former administration official.

“But where it quickly breaks down is what does that look like? And what are the specific policy changes?”

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.