If anyone knows what, exactly, President Donald Trump wants to include in his ideal immigration bill, I’d like to hear from them. So would the Republican lawmakers and staffers on Capitol Hill who are trying to strike an agreement this week to pass legislation that would address family separation, border security, and DACA.
To be fair, Trump has endorsed conservative immigration plans such as Judiciary chairman Bob Goodlatte’s bill, as well as the RAISE Act, which would drastically reduce legal immigration. However, neither of those bills has a chance of passing Congress. Faced with pressure from House GOP moderates, Republican leaders have come up with a compromise bill that is expected to get a vote this week. Trump will meet with House Republicans at the Capitol on Tuesday night, where he is supposed to pitch members on the plan.
But just hours before the meeting, the president told the National Federation of Independent Businesses that he already had concerns with the bill.
“So we have a House that’s getting ready to finalize an immigration package that they’re going to brief me on later, and then I’m gonna make changes to it,” said Trump.
Nobody seems to know what Trump’s desired changes might entail. The White House did not respond to request for comment. And Republicans on Capitol Hill were stumped. “I’m not sure what he meant today,” said one senior GOP aide. “He was just talking.” Several other Republican staffers and lawmakers were similarly perplexed.
The comments came after Trump indicated he did not support the compromise bill during an impromptu interview during Fox and Friends last Friday. The president said he would not sign “the moderate bill.” “I need a bill that gives this country tremendous border security,” said Trump. “I have to have that.” The White House later walked back Trump’s comments, a spokesman saying that Trump had misunderstood the question. “The president fully supports both the Goodlatte bill and the House leadership bill,” White House principal deputy press secretary Raj Shah said in a statement.
The confusion makes drafting a bill more difficult for House GOP leaders, who say they won’t consider any legislation that doesn’t have Trump’s full-throated endorsement. To make discussions more complicated, the broader immigration debate has been overshadowed by controversy over the White House’s family separation policies, which have led to more than 2,000 children being separated from their parents since last month, according to the Washington Post.
Republicans in Congress have largely condemned the practice, employed under the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy in which unauthorized migrants are being prosecuted for illegal entry without exception. Trump and his cabinet officials claim that the family separation policy is required under law, but as TWS fact checker Holmes Lybrand writes, “current law does not mandate family separation at the border—there is simply no federal statute that requires such activity, which is made obvious by the lack of enforcement of this policy prior to April.”
Still, Trump has called on Congress to “CHANGE THE LAWS!” pertaining to migrant detention. Lawmakers in the Senate have offered a number of solutions to the problem, including ones as simple as Lindsey Graham’s suggestion that Trump just pick up the phone and make a call to end it.
But the White House has indicated Trump wants a more comprehensive immigration reform bill, rather than one that would specifically address family separation. House Republicans are attempting to address the issue in their compromise immigration bill, according to a House GOP source familiar with the drafting.
The aide said the legislation would require the Department of Homeland Security to house families as a unit while migrant parents go through criminal proceedings for the misdemeanor of first-time illegal entry, rather than putting parents in the Justice Department’s custody. The bill would eliminate a 20-day limit on DHS’s custody for accompanied children, allowing families to remain together during the proceedings, which take time. It would also provide funding for Trump’s border wall and would give some Dreamers a merit-based path to citizenship.
The GOP staffer said the bill was still being finalized, and that an updated version would be shared before Tuesday night’s conference meeting.
