WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has given Congress a nearly impossible task: Save nearly 800,000 young people who were brought to this country illegally as children, and overhaul the rest of the immigration system — all within six months.
Lawmakers are pursuing at least two different, more narrow approaches to keeping the undocumented immigrants, sometimes referred to as “Dreamers,” in this country legally. Any effort to give them a path to citizenship faces resistance from conservative Republicans.
But Trump made the effort even tougher Tuesday when he said a clean bill to help Dreamers, a political flashpoint for years, would not be enough.
In announcing the end of President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program on Tuesday, Trump indicated he won’t sign anything that doesn’t include other administration priorities on immigration, notably building a U.S.-Mexico border wall and reducing the number of green cards available to legal immigrants.
“We can’t take just a one-piece fix,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said later in the day. “We’ve got to do an overall immigration reform that’s responsible and, frankly, that’s lawful.”
If Congress doesn’t act in six months, Trump’s deadline for congressional action before DACA officially ends, some of the program’s recipients could face deportation.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said Tuesday that Congress shouldn’t waste its time on legislation that Trump won’t sign.
“It is important that the White House clearly outline what kind of legislation the president is willing to sign,” Rubio said in a statement.
Still, legislative efforts were proceeding. On Tuesday afternoon, Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., indicated they would push their bipartisan bill to codify DACA into law, despite uncertainty about whether Trump would sign it.
The lawmakers said they believed the so-called “Dream Act” should be passed this month as a “down payment” on more comprehensive immigration overhaul legislation to be negotiated at a later date.
Graham said with Dreamers’ fate in a delicate balance, “we don’t have (the) luxury” of time to wrap the Dream Act into a larger, comprehensive bill. He should know: He and his colleagues spent months trying to advance comprehensive immigration overhaul legislation in 2013, managing to pass it in the Senate. It went nowhere in the House thanks to a GOP jittery over its base.
Durbin said that back when the Senate passed that bill, “I swallowed hard” on compromises such as stricter border enforcement provisions. He suggested would be ready to do the same now, but Dreamers need to be protected first.
Democrats are lining up behind the new Graham-Durbin bill. Some Republicans support the Dream Act, and Graham added that Trump could significantly speed up the process of passing a DACA fix and comprehensive immigration legislation if he got involved in the process.