Trump central to debate over ‘Dreamers’
WASHINGTON — The Senate will open a rare, open-ended debate on immigration and the fate of the “Dreamer” immigrants today. But the most influential voice in the conversation may be at the White House.
If the aim is to pass a legislative solution, President Donald Trump is a crucial player. His ultimate support will be vital if Congress is to overcome electionyear pressures against compromise. No Senate deal is likely to see the daylight in the more conservative House without the president’s blessing and promise to sell a compromise to his hard-line base.
Trump has thus far balked on that front.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., scheduled an initial procedural vote for this evening to begin debate. It’s expected to succeed easily, then the Senate will spend days or weeks sorting through proposals.
Democrats and some Republicans say they want to help the “Dreamers,” young immigrants who have lived in the U.S. illegally since they were children. Trump has said he wants to aid them and has even proposed a path to citizenship for 1.8 million, but in exchange wants $25 billion for his proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall plus significant curbs to legal immigration.
McConnell agreed to the open-ended debate, a Senate rarity in recent years, after Democrats forced a government shutdown last month and would supply enough votes to reopen agencies only after promise of a debate and votes on immigration.
What’s certain is that to prevail, any plan will need 60 votes, meaning substantial support from both parties. Republicans control the chamber 51-49, but Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has been home for weeks battling brain cancer. It’s unclear who will offer what. Some version of Trump’s plan and a bipartisan proposal to give Dreamers a chance at citizenship — with no border security money or legal immigration restrictions — seem likely to surface. Both are considered certain to fail.
Some senators have discussed a barebones plan to protect Dreamers for a year in exchange for a year’s worth of security money. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., has said he’s working on a three-year version of that.
Trump made a clamp-down on immigration a staple of his 2016 presidential campaign. Last September he said he was ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which lets Dreamers temporarily live and work in the U.S. He gave Congress until March 5 to replace it, but a federal court has forced him to continue its protections.
The court’s blunting of the deadline has made congressional action even less likely. Lawmakers rarely take difficult votes without a forcing mechanism — especially in an election year, raising the prospect that the Senate debate launching today will largely serve to frame a larger fight over the issue on the campaign trail.
Trump seemed to acknowledge that in a tweet Saturday: “Republicans want to fix DACA far more than the Democrats do. The Dems had all three branches of government back in 2008-2011, and they decided not to do anything about DACA. They only want to use it as a campaign issue. Vote Republican!”