As Congress returns, no clear fix for DREAMers

WASHINGTON – Congress is set to return to Washington this week, but don’t expect votes on a solution for the undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, some of whom could start being deported as early as next month.

The Senate is scheduled to vote on President Trump’s judicial and administration nominees, while House Republican leaders are still trying to find enough votes to pass a party-line immigration bill that has almost no chance of passing through the Senate, where it will have to gain a 60-vote majority to avoid a Democratic filibuster.

What was supposed to be a week of free-flowing immigration debate earlier this month sparked and then quickly fizzled, after the Senate failed to advance four pieces of immigration legislation in just a couple of hours.

Then they broke for a week-long recess. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he would bring up immigration legislation in the future — but only if it was guaranteed to pass and that Trump would support it. In the meantime, he said, the Senate was moving onto other business.

Congress is struggling to reach a compromise to give legal certainty for the immigrants whose parents brought them to the United States as children. In the fall, Trump ended an Obama-era program that protected nearly 800,000 of the DREAMers from deportation. He gave Congress until March 5 to find a solution.

The urgency has been blunted a bit after a federal judge in California ordered the Department of Homeland Security to resume the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The department is now operating DACA until the Supreme Court weighs in. That means the program — which protects some of the DREAMers — may survive until sometime this summer, the earliest the court could rule, even without congressional action.

Bipartisan support exists for some form of legal protection for DREAMers, but fights over who should be protected, to what level and what should be included in the overall deal has forced Congress to a standstill.

Following the failed votes in the Senate, Republican Whip John Cornyn of Texas said the best option may be to add temporary protections for DACA recipients onto the next must-pass spending bill.