Republicans have cleared the first hurdle in a quest to pass key border security and immigration legislation and fulfill leadership's campaign promise to resolve the crisis as its first order of business.

The House Judiciary Committee approved the Border Security and Enforcement Act of 2023 after a marathon 12-hour bill markup that began early Wednesday morning and stretched into the evening.

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Members voted 23-15 to advance the bill toward the House floor. The more-than-130-page proposal included language from a series of bills House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) had vowed to fast-track. A solution to the border crisis has been the source of GOP infighting over the past three months.

Members from both parties became more impassioned as the hours flew by. In one address, one of the bill's authors, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), lambasted Democrats for their concerns over children who were separated from their parents at the border when the Biden administration lost track of 85,000 children, as a recent New York Times report found.

“Your current system has 85,000 kids they can't find. What in the world? It's the New York Times. It's not Fox News," Roy said.

Democrats and Republicans debated for hours on amendments that had to do with the E-Verify worker verification program, the Biden administration's use of parole on a wide-scale level rather than on select people seeking admission, and how to respond to unaccompanied minors at the border.

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA) introduced an amendment that would exempt unaccompanied children from a portion of the bill Roy had authored that would give the Department of Homeland Security the authority to bar all illegal immigrants, including children.

House Freedom Caucus members Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Roy protested the idea and said such an amendment would give children no reason to go to the ports of entry to seek asylum so they would end up in the hands of Mexican cartels to get in between the ports.

Scanlon reintroduced the amendment to protect children under 5 years old only, but the proposal was denied. Frustrated, Scanlon tried for a third time and introduced the amendment to exempt infants under age 1 from not being able to seek asylum, but the motion failed.

GOP progress on fixing the border was hamstrung by the dramatic battle for the speaker's gavel in January. The various rounds of horse trading resulted in McCarthy promising to fast-track some dissenters' border bills.

The series of bills before the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday was thought to be the avenue the GOP would use to push through its agenda. One such bill authored by Roy required the DHS to "suspend the entry of any non-U.S. nationals (aliens under federal law) without valid entry documents during any period when DHS cannot detain such an individual or return the individual to a foreign country contiguous to the United States."

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Although most Texas Republicans supported Roy's push, more centrist Republicans, including border lawmaker Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX), said it was "un-Christian" for how it barred legitimate asylum-seekers and vowed to block it from passing.

Over the past two months of bickering, the House Homeland Security Committee has quietly been building its proposal to overhaul border policies. In the next week, that committee will introduce a separate comprehensive bill that targets a slew of border matters, going beyond the package put forth by members of the Judiciary Committee.