Senators from both parties came together on Thursday to reject a series of proposals to overhaul the nation’s policies on immigration amid signs that a deal that Republicans and Democrats can agree on remains far off for now.
A proposal put forth by a bipartisan group of senators that fell six votes short of passage would have granted legal status to young immigrants, provided $25 billion over the next decade for security at the border with Mexico and curbed family-based migration but not to the extent sought by the Trump administration.
Before voting began, the administration attacked Senator Lindsay Graham, a Republican who helped to craft the measure. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a White House official accused Graham of being “an obstacle” for immigration reforms and charged him with “being part of the problem.”
1) The President ended DACA unilaterally.
2) He then said: work out a bi-partisan bill I’ll sign anything you bring me.
3) He was promptly brought a bi-partisan deal. He rejected it.
4) He was then brought a *second* bi-partisan deal with even more support. He rejected *that*— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) February 15, 2018
A response by Graham suggested that the official was Stephen Miller, a White House aide and immigration hard-liner who has lobbied for strict limits on the number of people who can come to the U.S. “As long as the president allows Steve Miller and others to run the show down there, we’re never going to get anywhere,” Graham said.
Prospects for an immigration overhaul look no better in the House, where far-right Republicans are pressuring Speaker Paul Ryan to do no more than grant temporary work permits for so-called Dreamers. The conservatives also aim to clamp down on security at the border and restrict legal immigration beyond what the White House has proposed.
The difficulty of resolving differences over immigration by legislation ups the likelihood that the fate of Dreamers will be decided by the courts.
On Tuesday, a federal judge in Brooklyn blocked the Trump administration from ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), saying the government had not offered legally adequate reasons for doing so.
In a 55-page ruling, Judge Nicholas Garaufis noted the inconsistency between the administration’s decision to wind down the program with its “stated rationale for ending the program (namely, that DACA was unconstitutional).”
The ruling marked the second by a federal judge to order the administration to keep DACA in place as legal challenges to the rollback continue.