Biden Invites Congressional Leaders to White House to Discuss Aid to Ukraine

President Biden invited congressional leaders to a meeting at the White House on Wednesday to discuss his funding request for Ukraine, Israel and the border, which has been stalled for weeks on Capitol Hill.

Mr. Biden’s request for the $110.5 billion package has been held up by Republicans who are demanding a new crackdown at the border in exchange for their votes.

The president and his aides have warned that failing to approve funding could hand a victory to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whose forces invaded Ukraine two years ago. The United States authorized the last of its assistance for Ukraine at the end of December.

Asked whether Mr. Biden’s invitation signaled that the White House had something new to offer Republicans, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters that negotiations were “ongoing.”

“We believe it’s going well, and we want to see a bipartisan agreement,” she said. “The president understands that what we see at the border, the immigration system more broadly, has been broken for decades.”

An in-person meeting at the White House would be the first face-to-face discussion between Mr. Biden and the congressional leaders in months. The president’s legislative and national security aides have been in discussions with their counterparts on Capitol Hill since before the Christmas holiday.

Mr. Biden said as recently as this weekend that he was prepared to make concessions on the border. Some of the proposals on the table include making it more difficult to gain asylum in the United States, which the White House has signaled it is willing to consider.

But Republicans also want to restrict the use of an immigration policy known as humanitarian parole, which has allowed thousands of Afghans, Ukrainians and others who fled war, poverty and violence to come to the United States.

“I think we have to make major changes at the border,” Mr. Biden said. “I’ve been pushing it. I’m prepared to make significant alterations at the border. And there are negotiations going on for the last five weeks, so I’m hopeful we’ll get there.”

Still, prospects for bipartisan consensus have dimmed. House Speaker Mike Johnson has told rank-and-file Republicans he will reject the Senate’s Ukraine-border deal.

But Mr. Johnson will be facing a very different audience at the White House meeting, when he and other congressional leaders and the chairs and ranking members of the Hill’s various national security committees will meet to discuss the path forward.

Those lawmakers — Republican and Democrat — support continuing to arm Ukraine, and see doing so as a matter of maintaining American credibility on the international stage.

The last time Mr. Johnson attended a similar meeting was in October, on the second day of his speakership. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, and leading Republicans and Democrats from the House national security committees, impressed upon him in the Situation Room that he had to guarantee that Congress would not abandon Ukrainians.

Mr. Johnson, who had never voted in favor of a supplemental aid package for Ukraine, emerged from the meeting saying that Ukraine’s plight would not be forgotten.

But in the months since, Mr. Johnson has never committed to a timeline for bringing up a Ukraine aid package, or stated what details it might contain — deferring such particulars to Senate negotiators, whose efforts he has routinely criticized for falling short of the border enforcement bill that the House passed last spring.

The White House is under mounting pressure from state leaders of both parties to address the migrant crisis in the United States.

On Tuesday, Ms. Jean-Pierre was pressed on the increasingly dire situation for migrants in Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott had decided to take measures into his own hands.

Mr. Abbott has bused migrants to cities led by Democratic mayors and arrested migrants at the border on trespassing charges. The Biden administration has criticized the governor for impeding on federal authority.

The tension boiled over last week when Mr. Biden’s Homeland Security Department said border agents responding to a distress call about a woman and two children had been “physically barred” by Texas Military Department officials from accessing the area.

The migrants drowned in the river.

The Texas military officials said those migrants had already drowned by the time the Border Patrol agents requested access, and described the administration’s account as “wholly inaccurate.”

Karoun Demirjian and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.