NATION & WORLD IMMIGRATION UPSET:
White House later says he ‘fully supports’ bills
President Donald Trump upended Republican efforts to negotiate an immigration bill, saying Friday that he would not support a measure that Speaker Paul D. Ryan had painstakingly cobbled together.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump upended Republican efforts to negotiate an immigration bill that could pass the House, saying Friday that he would not support a measure that Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., had painstakingly cobbled together over the past week.
Hours after throwing the House Republican caucus into turmoil, the White House issued a statement saying, in effect, that the president had been confused.
Ryan’s plan has been to have the House vote next week on two bills — a hard-line measure that even its supporters say probably does not have the votes to pass the House — and a second, compromise measure that he had negotiated in hopes of gaining agreement among Republican factions.
Asked about the two bills during a “Fox & Friends” interview Friday morning, Trump shot down Ryan’s plan.
“I’m looking at both of them. I certainly wouldn’t sign the more moderate one,” he said. “I need a bill that gives this country tremendous border security. I have to have that.”
House Republican leaders expressed puzzlement at Trump’s reaction — White House officials had been closely involved in Ryan’s negotiations — and said they were shelving their plans to gauge support for the bill among their members until they could get clarification from the White House.
White House officials struggled to come up with an explanation and for hours, declined to comment on the record.
Late in the afternoon, White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah issued a statement saying that Trump “fully supports” both bills.
“In this morning’s interview, he was commenting on the discharge petition in the House,” Shah said, referring to an effort pushed by moderate Republicans to force a vote on a bipartisan immigration bill. That effort failed on Wednesday.
Among other provisions, Ryan’s bill would have taken direct aim at so-called sanctuary laws. Under the bill, jurisdictions that decline to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement could be held liable for failing to detain people in the U.S. illegally for deportation proceedings.
If local law enforcement officials did not comply with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement request to hold an immigrant who is in the country illegally, and that immigrant was released and later committed rape, murder or sexual assault of a minor, the victim or the victim’s family would be allowed to sue the jurisdiction, according to a draft of the bill released Thursday.
The bill would also curb the administration’s policy of separating families when they are apprehended trying to cross the border illegally. Instead, it would establish a policy of keeping parents and children together in family detention centers. Immigrant advocates have denounced those centers as harsh and sometimes dangerous.
Trump, in his interview, continued his effort to falsely portray family separation as something mandated by law, rather than chosen by his administration as a policy designed to deter people from trying to enter the country illegally.
“I hate the children being taken away,” he said. “That’s the law, and that’s what the Democrats gave us,” he added. No law requires separation of family members.
Trump frequently has railed about violent crimes committed by people in the country illegally during the 2016 campaign, most notably in the case of Kathryn Steinle, a San Francisco woman killed two years ago by a Mexican man who had been deported several times.
A federal judge in California ruled that Stienle’s parents could not sue San Francisco for failing to hold the man at an immigration official’s request.