By Louise Radnofsky and Natalie Andrews
WASHINGTON—Lawmakers return to Washington with a monthslong fight over border-security spending behind them, another battle over the national emergency declaration just beginning, and a familiar dilemma ahead: the unclear fate of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children.
Democrats in control of the House are under pressure to take action on two intertwining issues: resolving the legal status of the young immigrants dubbed “Dreamers,” and reckoning with calls from some within the party for a more aggressive approach in the broader immigration debate.
Potential legislation on the matter of Dreamers has support from both sides of the aisle, but Republicans would likely want to pair the bill with more border-security measures. Interest in the GOP-led Senate in taking up any bill is unclear.
Settling the Dreamer question is possibly the easier of the two issues. A majority of Americans want Congress to maintain protections for these immigrants, and they see them in a favorable light, Wall Street Journal/NBC News polls have found. In a 2018 poll, 58% of voters said a candidate would be more likely to win their vote by supporting a program to help Dreamers work or attend college legally in the U.S., while 22% said they would be less likely to support that candidate. Just over half of Americans had a favorable view of them, while only 19% held a negative view, in a 2017 poll.
But this year, when the White House and Republicans offered a bill allowing a three-year extension of protected status for the young immigrants, Democrats rejected it, both sides said. Democrats were reluctant to engage in negotiations over anything less than a permanent legislative resolution for Dreamers, which a year ago they had been willing to consider trading for wall funding.
Even when lawmakers began meeting behind closed doors to hammer out a 2019 spending deal that would include some money for border barriers, Democrats in both chambers agreed early in the process in a meeting in Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office that the Dreamer issue would stay off the negotiating table unless the president intervened and insisted on it.
Some argued that temporary protections in exchange for a permanent wall was a bad deal. A senior Democratic aide said the decision was made because there was limited time to resolve a range of spending issues, and throwing immigration policy into the mix could have thwarted negotiations.
House Democrats now plan to introduce a version of a bill next month to grant permanent protections to the Dreamers, an aide to Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D., Calif.) said. But the measure will be heard by the Judiciary Committee before it has a vote, meaning it could be several weeks, if not months, before a floor vote.
The specifics of the legislation aren’t yet clear. Several versions have been introduced in past years; the bill is intended to grant conditional residency to illegal immigrants brought to the country as children and later, upon meeting set qualifications, permanent residency or citizenship.
Republicans have accused Democrats of sacrificing the Dreamers simply to deny President Trump anything that would give him credit ahead of the 2020 elections.
“Sadly, the Dreamers are being held hostage to a Democratic strategy for 2020,” said Ralph Reed, head of the conservative Faith and Freedom Coalition, which has come out in support of legal status for the Dreamers.
A few Democrats, too, objected. Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D., N.Y.) was among a handful of lawmakers who voted against the spending bill that funded the government through September because it didn’t have a proposal for Dreamers. “I say that the Dreamer’s middle name is mañana,” he said, using the Spanish word for tomorrow.
Some advocates want Democrats to take on an even more daunting fight now: a potentially bruising debate in which they articulate their own immigration vision.
“What we want to see is for the Democrats to invest time in a proactive, affirmative conversation,” said Kamal Essaheb, policy and advocacy director for the National Immigration Law Center. “We can’t just be on our heels responding to the latest thing.”
President Obama established through executive action the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for the young immigrants after some bills to protect the immigrants failed in Congress. President Trump canceled it in 2017, saying he believed the administration lacked the authority to act without backing from Congress, but that he was sympathetic to the program’s participants.
Several lawsuits have put a stay on stopping the program and allowed participants to continue to apply for renewals to the program.
In January, the Supreme Court made clear it would take no immediate action on the Trump administration’s request to hear cases involving the president’s planned cancellation of the program.
The court’s decision to postpone any DACA action made it all but impossible the court could hear the case this term. DACA beneficiaries, currently numbering near 700,000, will be able to retain their benefits during that time.
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