“Exclusive: Bipartisan House group unveils new DACA proposal
By Tal Kopan, CNN
A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House are unveiling Monday their proposal to resolve the immigration standoff in Washington, even as the White House has offered a more conservative plan.
The group of 48 lawmakers, split evenly by party, are calling for their immigration-border security outline to be included in a budget deal that has evaded congressional leadership for months because of the impasse on immigration and other issues.
The Problem Solvers Caucus has worked since last fall to come up with a solution on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protected young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children from deportation and which President Donald Trump decided in September to terminate by March 5.
The Problem Solvers proposal resembles an offer from a bipartisan Senate group led by Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, and Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, which was rejected by Trump and has been declared dead in the Senate by GOP leadership.
The White House, meanwhile, last week unveiled its own proposal that would offer a pathway to citizenship for nearly 2 million undocumented immigrants but contains a number of other sweeping immigration changes that met instant resistance from the left.
It’s unclear why the Problem Solvers Caucus proposal would have more success than the Durbin-Graham proposal, but the bipartisan group has been negotiating for months in the hope that if enough rank-and-file members can show consensus across the aisle, it could pick up steam with leadership as an option as funding talks continue without success, and provide a counterpoint to hardline bills pushed by more conservative House Republicans.
More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/29/politics/daca-bipartisan-deal-problem-solvers/index.html
Reality sets in that DACA deal might not get done
By Tal Kopan, CNN
After months of rhetoric and negotiations on immigration with the parties barely any closer to each other, the reality is beginning to dawn that there may be no deal to be had.
Stakeholders working toward a deal on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, likely including border security, are not giving up hope. But the White House’s and some Republicans’ insistence on adding new restrictions to legal immigration and the left’s opposition could be an insurmountable gap.
The White House on Thursday released its proposed framework for a deal on DACA, a program that protected young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children that President Donald Trump is terminating as of March 5 but pushing lawmakers to replace.
The proposal did have some concessions to Democrats, including a path to citizenship for an estimated 1.8 million undocumented immigrants, but also included aggressive cuts to legal immigration and a push for enhanced enforcement powers, along with upwards of $25 billion for a wall and other border security. The framework also ends family migration beyond spouses and minor children and abolishes the diversity visa lottery.
The proposal was panned by the left and the right. Groups who support restricting immigration slammed it as “amnesty.” Democratic lawmakers and immigration advocates rejected it as a “massive, cruel and family-punishing overhaul of our current legal immigration system,” as New Jersey’s Sen. Bob Menendez phrased it.
The framework, plus Trump’s earlier rejection of an offer from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to authorize upwards of $20 billion for a wall and a vulgar rejection of a bipartisan proposal from the Senate “Gang of Six,” could mean that the only option left is a temporary extension of DACA with no future certainty. Some lawmakers have even started mentioning the latter option.
For now a permanent solution for DACA is “dead,” said Leon Fresco, an immigration attorney who led immigration negotiations for Schumer in 2013.
“Thursday pretty much lined it up as the final verdict,” Fresco said. “When Trump proposed something that in orthodoxy was not possible in the Democrat world and got criticized by the right, that was the end of the deal, because how can Trump agree to something more liberal now? … For both sides, the deal is completely unacceptable, so that’s what makes this very complicated.”
One longtime lobbyist on the issue, Randel Johnson, who recently left the US Chamber of Commerce to join the law firm Seyfarth Shaw as a partner, wasn’t quite ready to give up but did acknowledge that neither side may be able to come far enough toward the other to reach a deal.
“I think the danger is both sides begin posturing to their respective bases and both sides will walk away earning brownie points with their bases and get nothing done,” Johnson said.”
More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/29/politics/daca-deal-reality/index.html
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In my career, I’ve seen these things “spring back to life.” But given the tortured history of DACA and the White Nationalist agenda driving the GOP restrictionists, I don ‘t see this as being one those times.
I also can’t see the Dems threatening another Government shutdown on this issue.
The “Wildcard” here, at least for the current “Dreamers:” What the Supremes and, perhaps, the lower Federal Courts do with the DACA litigation.
PWS
01-29-18