Garcia has new chance to save ‘Dreamers’
Democrats who won House will fight for immigration deals
WASHINGTON — Ten years ago, as a Harris County commissioner, Sylvia Garcia joined a national conference of Latino leaders where then-presidential candidate Barack Obama — proclaiming “Si, se puede” (Yes, we can) — promised to sign the Dream Act, providing legal status to undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.
“Of course, we stayed on him and stayed on him about that,” Garcia said about the long-stalled bill, which bogged down in partisan gridlock and never made it to Obama’s desk.
Now, as one of two newly-elected Latina congresswomen from Texas, Garcia, a Democrat from Houston’s working-class east side, will get her turn as part of a renewed push to pass legislation protecting “Dreamers.”
Whether there’s a deal to be done in the Congress that convenes in January will depend in large part on the politics of the border wall that President Donald Trump made the centerpiece of his 2016 campaign. Despite Trump’s frequent claims to the contrary, it remains an unfulfilled promise to his conservative base — and the focus of a threatened government shutdown by Friday.
As the current lame-duck Congress grapples with Trump’s $5 billion wall funding request for next year, incoming lawmakers are already looking ahead to the potential endgame of a comprehensive immigration package, including a “fix” for Dreamers, that is certain to be a top priority of the new Democratic majority in the House.
But much like the Republican House majority they will replace, Democrats are divided both on tactics and aims of negotiations with the Trump White House and the Republican-led Senate.
While some see a historic opportunity for compromise in a divided Congress, others remain skeptical that Trump, with an eye on 2020, will abandon a list of hardline immigration demands — including restrictions on legal immigration and ending birthright citizenship — that has only expanded since he took office.
Meanwhile it’s increasingly doubtful that longtime immigration activists like Garcia will go along with a deal to exchange wall funding for Dreamer protections — a formula that blew up in an acrimonious Senate debate earlier this year.
“I’d have to see the whole deal, but right now I can’t imagine a package that would include the wall and the Dream Act that I could support,” she said.
“You can’t be a welcoming country, providing for children, and still want a wall. They’re two different messages.”
Garcia, the president of the National Associations of Latino Elected Officials when Obama took office, could be an influential new voice in the debate, along with Congresswoman-elect Veronica Escobar, who will represent the El Paso district of rising Democratic star Beto O’Rourke.
Divided Congress
Escobar, following in O’Rourke’s footsteps, has called the border “secure” and declared “it is time to move on to more humane and comprehensive immigration reform.”
The two are the first Latinas elected to Congress from Texas, a border state that’s home to an estimated 126,000 Dreamers, and where the GOP lost two House seats. One was held by Houston Republican John Culberson, a leading congressional critic of so-called sanctuary cities.
Whichever faction holds sway in the 116th Congress, the Democrats’ gains in the 2018 midterm elections have created an entirely new political dynamic. That was recognized by Trump in recent remarks suggesting that “we have a much easier path” to negotiate on a host of issues, from immigration to health care, by dealing out hard-line members of the GOP’s Freedom Caucus who frequently haunted Republican House leaders.
Some Republicans see Trump offering an olive branch. “The big question: Will House Democrats take him up on it?” former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen wrote in recent Washington Post essay.
But analysts on the other end of the spectrum see little more than a feint to put the onus on Democrats if nothing gets done. “It’s true that Donald Trump wants to show that he’s a deal maker, but you can see with his threat to shut down the government over wall funding that this is more about saving his own skin, and often that means pandering to his base,” said longtime Congress watcher Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.
Still, Ornstein and others see a precedent for progress under divided government, such as when House Republicans compromised with President Bill Clinton in the 1990s to enact major welfare reform.
“I’ve always believed that a divided Congress is actually the best place to do hard things that neither party can do, politically, on their own,” said Texas U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate.
Despite widespread hostility among immigration activists to Trump’s wall, some believe that Democratic control of the House gives them a unique opportunity to leverage concessions by trading border protections for the rights of an estimated 3.2 million Dreamers in the U.S.
“The immigration rights movement has a responsibility to say, ‘OK, there’s leverage here. Let’s get everything we can for it,’” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum.
But years of Trump rhetoric on immigration have taken their toll, particularly for critics who see a racial tinge in many of his pronouncements. Much of that suspicion has stemmed from the ongoing legal battle over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Obama’s stop-gap remedy for Dreamers, which Trump has sought to end.
“Offering even a dollar toward border wall construction in exchange for relief for DACA recipients is the definition of stupidity,” said U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela, a Democrat from Brownsville. “The president has demonstrated time after time that he has no interest in protecting Dreamers. Knowing that they are facing a totally unreliable negotiator in the White House, why would Democratic leaders even consider giving the president billions in border wall funding? We need more from our leaders than repeating the same mistakes.”
Either way, some of the loudest Democrat voices have made clear what their starting position is on immigration.
‘All hands on deck’
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus, including San Antonio Democrat Joaquin Castro, sent a letter to Democratic leaders Thursday urging that they bring legislation to the House floor in the first 100 days of the new Congress that would grant a “pathway to citizenship” to DACA recipients and to refugees who currently have Temporary Protected Status to work in the U.S.
Separately, a group of 12 Democrats led by Texas border Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez wrote a letter to Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer opposing any border wall funding in the current year-end spending negotiations.
The letter was also signed by Escobar, Castro, and Houston Democrat Al Green.
“We need all hands on deck to oppose frivolous border wall spending proposals — that includes Leader Schumer,” Gonzalez said.
After meeting with the Democratic leader from New York, Cuellar and Gonzalez issued a joint statement saying they had agreed that “we should be focused on real border security, and not the president’s campaign obsession with a concrete wall.”
While the White House sees the Republican-led lame duck Congress as its last chance to secure money for Trump’s wall, Democrats like Garcia are not ruling out immigration initiatives that involve enhanced border security.
“Maybe not the wall he has in mind, but there might be some dollars,” said Garcia, citing the sort of surveillance and technology upgrades that Republican moderates like San Antonio U.S. Rep. Will Hurd have sought to fund instead of a concrete wall.
But after gaining close to 40 seats in the House in an election widely seen as a referendum on Trump, Garcia and other Democrats believed that they now have the upper hand on immigration.
Some cite the high price Republicans paid in immigrant-rich California, where Democrats flipped seven congressional districts held by Republicans.
“Let’s just talk politics,” Garcia said. “If you really look at where the Republicans did not perform, it was in the parts of the country where they were most anti-immigrant and anti-Latino.”
With a new presidential election cycle getting under way, many analysts say every legislative decision over the next two years will be made with an eye on the 2020 elections. For Trump, as well as for Democrats, the choices will be compromise, or stick to their bases. live and