USA TODAY International Edition
Lawmaker: Trump backs immigration compromise
Yet president continues his attack on Democrats
WASHINGTON – House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul insisted Sunday that President Donald Trump remains “100 percent” behind a compromise House immigration bill, despite Trump saying last week that Congress should give up its efforts until after the election in November.
“I did talk to the White House (Saturday); they did say the president is still 100 percent behind us,” Rep. McCaul, R-Texas, said on “Fox News Sunday.”
McCaul, along with House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., pushes a bill that would provide a pathway to citizenship for about 1.8 million young immigrants brought to the USA as children, provide about $23 billion for a border wall and place limits on legal immigration. The bill would allow children and their parents to remain together at detention centers if they’re caught crossing the border illegally.
“I am the eternal optimist, and I do think there are 218 Republicans that agree (on the need to pass the bill),” McCaul said.
A “zero tolerance” immigration policy announced by the Trump administration in April led to the separation of babies, children and adolescents from their parents. Trump signed an executive order Wednesday to stop separations, but confusion remains about the fate of more than 2,000 children taken from their families. Federal officials announced a plan Saturday to reunite children with their parents in a mass detention center near Brownsville, Texas. It remained unclear how long it would take to bring them back together.
As of June 20, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was caring for 2,053 children separated from their adult family members, according to an agency fact sheet released Saturday. Customs and Border Protection reunited 522 children in its custody who were separated as part of the zero tolerance initiative, according to HHS.
Trump first said he was strongly behind House efforts to pass a bill, then tweeted Friday that “Republicans should stop wasting their time on Immigration until after we elect more Senators and Congressmen/women in November.”
Trump blamed Democrats for the immigration stalemate, though GOP leaders could not muster enough Republicans to pass a bill last week. “Democrats, fix the laws. Don’t RESIST,” he tweeted Sunday.
He tweeted later Sunday morning, “We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country.”
Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., a moderate on immigration and a frequent critic of Trump, said Sunday that the president must stop bashing Democrats if he truly wants to pass legislation to fix the immigration system.
“When the president calls them clowns and losers, how does he expect the Democrats to sit down and work with Republicans on these issues,” Flake said on ABC’s “This Week.” “Words matter. What the president says matters, and he ought to knock that off.”