Top Senate Democrats plan to forge ahead on a long-stalled immigration bill in the two months following the midterm elections and hold Republicans’ feet to the fire to offer legal status to immigrants who were illegally brought over the border as children.
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Menendez (D-NJ) put President Joe Biden and Senate Republicans on notice during a call with immigrant advocates Tuesday about Democrats’ plan to move on the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program come November. The challenge, they said, will be finding 10 Republicans to hit the 60-vote threshold to pass any such bill — a problem that has doomed previous efforts in the Senate.
“We need 10 Republicans,” said Durbin. “The question is whether in a lame-duck session 10 Republicans will step up. I can count four or five going into this but no more. The rest of those are still in doubt.”
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Durbin and Menendez pointed to former President Donald Trump as the reason Republicans are fearful about working across the aisle to codify DACA.
“President Trump, he made immigration a political tool for his party, and he put into fear of our colleagues that if they did not toe the line in that regard, they could very well face his wrath in a primary,” Menendez said. “That’s why it’s hard to find Republicans who are willing to go out there and put themselves on the limb.”
“Many of them would come and whisper to me privately, ‘I’m with you, but I’m afraid to vote this way,’” Durbin added.
Both senators agreed that despite an all-out effort to get enough Republicans to support immigration reform between the election and the new session of Congress in early January, they may fall short of recruiting 10 Republicans. They said voters ought to pick Senate candidates next month who are open to negotiating a DACA bill, in case another go-around is possible next year.
DACA was rolled out by Obama-era Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano in 2012 following Congress’s stalling on passing a law that provided a pathway to citizenship for this particular demographic of illegal immigrants.
Former President Barack Obama acted on DACA after years of failed attempts by Congress to give legal status to immigrants who illegally entered the country. DACA allowed noncitizens who were then under the age of 31 and had entered America before turning 16 years old and before 2007 to request that the government not deport them. DACA recipients also received documents to work in the U.S. legally. The protections were good for two years at a time and then would require applying for renewal.
In the decade since, Congress has not moved to create a permanent solution for illegal immigrants who want to remain in the country permanently.
Texas and eight other states filed lawsuits in 2018 over the legitimacy of DACA, in which 800,000 people have enrolled since 2012. When Trump moved to terminate DACA, the government was again sued by those who wished to keep it in place and argued Trump had not properly justified ending it. The Supreme Court backed immigrant advocates in 2020.
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The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this month on the Biden administration’s appeal of the federal decision in the Texas lawsuit. The appeals court’s decision sent the matter back to Judge Andrew Hanen of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, a Trump appointee who will decide the legality of the changes made to DACA under Biden. Those changes were slated to go into effect at the end of October.
