House GOP’s hard-line stance on immigration highlights difficulties of striking a deal.
WASHINGTON — Prominent House Republicans stepped forward on Wednesday with a vision of immigration policy that clashed fiercely with President Donald Trump’s recent overtures of bipartisanship and highlighted how difficult it will be for Congress and the president to reach accord in the coming weeks.
The proposal, championed by the chairmen of the House Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees, would crack down on illegal immigration and sharply reduce the number of legal immigrants to the United States. Coming one day after Trump held an extraordinary meeting in which he laid out the parameters for a bipartisan immigration deal, the House proposal highlighted the uncertainty surrounding negotiations that are supposed to coalesce before the government runs out of money Jan. 19.
“This is the only bill that’s going to unify the conference, and it’s going to get us to a majority of the conference,” said Rep. Raúl Labrador, R-Idaho, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus who participated in Tuesday’s White House meeting.
Trump convened Tuesday’s session to address the fate of young unauthorized immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally by their parents and were eligible for work permits under an Obama-era initiative called the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. Trump rescinded DACA in September and gave Congress six months to come up with a replacement.
During Tuesday’s session, the president and lawmakers outlined four broad areas to be negotiated as part of a bipartisan immigration deal: shielding the young unauthorized immigrants, sometimes called Dreamers after a never-passed bill called the DREAM Act, from deportation; limiting family-based migration, in which one relative can sponsor another; ending the visa lottery system; and improving border security.
But the House measure, put forth by a group that includes two committee chairmen — Judiciary’s Bob Goodlatte of Virginia and Homeland Security’s Michael McCaul of Texas — was far more expansive.
It would require employers to use an internet-based system, known as E-Verify, to certify that they are hiring only legal workers; crack down on so-called sanctuary cities by denying them federal grants; allow for the detention of minors who are arrested at the border with their parents; and toughen sentences for criminals who have been deported and return illegally.
The measure would end the visa lottery program, as Trump wants, and end family-based migration for all relatives other than spouses and minor children. It would offer three-year renewable work permits to DACA recipients, without offering them a path to citizenship.
The new House Republicans’ stand underscored the uncertainty about immigration. Trump’s positions vacillate daily. And members of both parties are divided. Some Democrats are pressing for confrontation, while others seem to fear a political backlash. Some Republicans are searching for compromise against a conservative tide of anti-immigrant fervor.
Lorella Praeli, the director of immigration policy and campaigns at the American Civil Liberties Union, described the House legislation as a “collection of hard-line provisions designed to sabotage, rather than advance, the possibility of a bipartisan breakthrough.”
It was not clear if the proposal would ever come up for a vote in the House, especially after Tuesday’s White House meeting established the parameters for a bipartisan deal. And it is all but certain to have no future in the Senate, where immigration legislation would need 60 votes for passage and therefore could not make it through the chamber with only Republican support.
The immigration debate on Capitol Hill grew more complicated after a federal judge ruled Tuesday that, for now, the Trump administration could not end the DACA program.
The judge, William Alsup of U.S. District Court in San Francisco, wrote that the administration must “maintain the DACA program on a nationwide basis” while lawsuits challenging the decision to end the program move ahead.
Trump lashed out on Twitter, saying that the U.S. court system was “broken and unfair,” and members of both parties and immigration activists struggled to understand the legal and political implications of the judge’s ruling.
Officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which administers the program for young immigrants, said they are preparing to follow the order even as they await possible action by the Justice Department to appeal the ruling in the days ahead. In his order, the judge said Homeland Security must restart the program in a “reasonable” amount of time.
Administration officials expressed confidence that the ruling would be overturned on appeal. And activists urged young immigrants not to take any actions to try to renew their DACA benefits until the legal picture is clearer.
Still, both parties insisted that the legal case is a distraction to the only real, permanent solution for the young immigrants brought to the United States as children: legislation passed by Congress and signed by the president.
Democrats are pushing for a deal on DACA by Jan. 19, when government funding is set to expire. The stakes are significant: If talks break down and lawmakers cannot, at a minimum, approve another stopgap spending bill, much of the government would shut down in less than two weeks.