House GOP struggles to read Trump’s intent on bills

President dismisses Ryan’s compromise measure; White House officials later say he had misspoken

WASHINGTON — Conflicting messages from President Donald Trump and his aides over whether he would support a compromise immigration bill sent House Republicans into fits of confusion Friday, further diminishing the bill’s fortunes before a showdown vote next week.

Speaker Paul Ryan is planning to hold votes on two immigration measures: a hard-line conservative bill, which is almost certain to fail, and new legislation worked out by Republican immigration moderates and House conservatives, which Ryan promoted Thursday as a “very good compromise.”

But a day of White House drama left Republicans unsure of where the president stood, and uncertainty will not help legislation that would bring sweeping change to the United States’ immigration system. On Friday morning, Trump seemed to casually dismiss the delicate compromise.

“I’m looking at both of them,” Trump said on Fox and Friends .“I certainly wouldn’t sign the more moderate one.”

Senior aides in the White House quietly insisted that the president had misspoken, but it took hours for the White House to say that out loud.

Finally, early Friday evening, Raj Shah, a White House spokesman, issued a statement pledging Trump’s support for the compromise bill as well as for the hardline measure, which is sponsored by Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte of Virginia. Shah said the president’s opposition referred to an effort by moderate Republicans to use a so-called discharge petition to force the House to vote on narrower legislation to protect the young immigrants known as Dreamers, who are in the country without legal permission.

“The president fully supports both the Goodlatte bill and the House leadership bill,” Shah said. “In this morning’s interview, he was commenting on the discharge petition in the House and not the new package. He would sign either the Goodlatte or the leadership bills.”

It is unclear how much damage Trump’s comments had done — and whether Republicans will be satisfied with the assurance that the president does support the compromise.

“If he won’t sign it, we’ve got a major problem,” said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida before the White House’s clarification. He is one of 23 Republicans who signed the discharge petition in an attempt to force immigration votes in the House.

On Wednesday, Ryan had told House Republicans that Trump was enthusiastic about their effort on immigration. In fact, the compromise bill was built to please the president: It was shaped around the “four pillars” for immigration legislation that he had long ago laid out, including funding his promised wall on the southwest border and restricting family-based immigration.

Even before Trump’s comments Friday morning, the bill’s passage next week seemed highly uncertain. Democrats are expected to vote against it, and the measure was quickly labeled “amnesty” by critics on the right.

Republican leaders also risk losing votes among immigration moderates who have been eager to address the Dreamers, who have been protected under an Obama-era program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which Trump moved last year to end.

“I am concerned that the concepts proposed for legislation next week have an overreliance on ineffective and expensive fourth-century security solutions and an unclear path to citizenship for DACA-eligible young men and women at the expense of existing visa programs,” said Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, another Republican who signed the petition. “I have and will always believe that the only way to permanently address these challenges is in a bipartisan fashion, and, unfortunately, this is not the path we are on.”

A 293-page draft of the compromise bill, circulated Thursday among lawmakers, would make broad changes to the nation’s immigration system. It would offer legal status to Dreamers and would create a special visa program that would allow them to receive green cards based on factors like employment and education. In turn, they could become citizens.

The bill would toughen rules for asylum-seekers, and it would provide billions of dollars for Trump’s border wall while making changes intended to strengthen immigration enforcement. It would also curb familybased immigration and eliminate the diversity visa lottery, which admits immigrants from countries that do not send many people to the United States.

Another significant and politically volatile issue is how the bill would affect the separation of children from parents at the border, a matter that has become front and center as the Trump administration has cracked down on illegal border crossings.

The Justice Department now has a “zero-tolerance” policy for people who cross the southwest border illegally, prosecuting all cases. Under that policy, put in place by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, children are split from their parents as their parents go through the criminal justice system. Ryan told reporters Thursday that he did not think families should be broken up and called for a legislative fix.

A summary of the draft bill said that it would ensure that children apprehended at the border were not separated from their parents while in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security.

But several immigration policy experts said Friday they did not believe the measure would stop the separation of children from parents who are prosecuted under the policy.

“There’s absolutely nothing in there that ends family separation,” said Kerri Talbot, a former Democratic Senate aide. “There’s definitely going to be family separations as long as there is this Sessions zero-tolerance policy.”

A House Republican aide said bill drafters were aware of the issue regarding the fate of children whose parents are prosecuted and were working to include language in the compromise bill that would keep families together under those circumstances, as well.

The compromise bill is the product of weeks of negotiations among lawmakers as House Republican leaders moved to defuse the rebellion from moderate members. The moderates fell two signatures short of what they needed on their discharge petition in order to force votes on immigration this month.

Trump’s comments Friday morning seemed to undercut Ryan’s argument against the moderates’ petition drive, which the speaker had said was pushing legislation that the president would never sign. On Thursday, Ryan said that with the compromise bill, the House was “bringing legislation to the floor that, if it passed all the way through the process, would make law.”