It is a strong arm tactic to try to get congress to give money to Ukraine.
That is precisely what it is.
Biden has already called the GOP tactics "political blackmail". Chuck Schumer said the Republicans are engaged in "hostage taking". Now with this torture business, Biden's gonna start calling them out as straight up traitors. Just wait.
"Folks - they're torturing Americans over there, and these people just couldn't care less!"
For our non-American members, here's the situation in a nutshell:
1) Republicans want border security reforms.
2) These include an expansion of immigration detention for asylum seekers, the ability to send asylum seekers to other countries the U.S. deems are safe, and limits on an immigration status known as humanitarian parole.
3) The Biden administration has used parole expansively to let in hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Ukraine war and asylum seekers at the border who sign up in advance.
4) The Biden administration, and the Democrats at large, are accusing the Republicans of engaging in one giant game of political "whataboutism". Their argument is that border security has nothing to do with Ukraine, and that the two should be discussed separately.
5) At the same time, daily crossings at are 8,000 people a day now. For those mathematically challenged, that's 2.9M people a year. The Republicans will not budge on this issue.
6) Democrats will similarly not budge, because turning away asylum seekers may be a graver sin in their mind, than even abandoning Ukraine.
7) Among the few compromises on the table right now, is this one: "Late Wednesday, Sens. Rick Scott (R., Fla.), Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) and Mike Lee (R., Utah) proposed that aid to Ukraine be conditioned on meeting metrics for reducing illegal crossings, with money released at a rate of $5 billion a month provided that the number of illegal crossings was reduced by about 20,000 from the prior month's levels."
8) Even this compromise, would likely severely hobble Ukraine's efforts at keeping its pants up.

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