A bipartisan group of U.S. Senators is still working with the White House to draft a bill that — if passed — would trigger massive changes at the border and move forward federal funding requested by the Biden administration last year. 

In a statement released by the White House on Friday, President Joe Biden said the bill being discussed now would include a new presidential authority to "shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed." 

How that would work in practice is still not clear. But Stephanie Brewer — director of Mexico for the research and advocacy group Washington Office on Latin America — says trying to completely cut off access to the U.S. will create a bottleneck across the border in Mexico and push migrants into the hands of organized crime. 

"Who prey on that population, who become enriched and empowered by these policies, as they take over more and more of the movement of people who no longer have a legal pathway to try and seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border," she said. 

No draft text or actual bill has come out, yet. But a person familiar with the negotiations said the measure being discussed would allow border officers to turn away migrants who arrive between ports of entry if they encounter a daily average of more than 4,000 people there daily border-wide. Asylum seekers would be able to continue arriving at a handful of ports of entry to vie for a fixed number of CBP One appointments, but the border would remain "shut down" until the number of arrivals in between ports decreases, or for up to 270 days. Late last year, border officers were encountering an average of 2,000 people per day in the Border Patrol's Tucson Sector alone. 

Brewer says that proposal sounds like the pandemic-era border restriction Title 42. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention protocol allowed border officers to turn away migrants on public health grounds, without giving them a chance to seek asylum — despite U.S. and international laws that require it.  

"And we don’t have to speculate about what the effects of that policy would be, because unfortunately in very recent years, we have overwhelming evidence of what those policies caused," she said.

Title 42 was enacted during the Trump administration and expanded by the Biden administration. Under it, the number of repeat crossings skyrocketed.

"The original Title 42 period of time coincided with the highest levels of arrivals at the U.S. border seen in decades, that's because we're living in a time right now of heightened migration, heightened push factors, heightened human mobility," she said. "We know for a fact that Title 42 doesn't fix that."