Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., warned Sunday that a legislative fix to the partial government shutdown won’t be passed by the Senate without border security funding.
“At the end of the day, there’s a deal to be had,” Graham said during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But everybody is changing their position here and most Americans are pretty tired of it. So to my Democratic friends, there will never be a deal without wall funding and many Republicans are going to offer something as an incentive to vote for wall funding that you have supported in the past.”
Graham predicted Sunday that GOP lawmakers would provide some degree of legal status to so-called “Dreamers” currently protected by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program in exchange for border security measures and reforms to the Temporary Protected Status framework.
“Here is what I think might work: $5 billion for the wall/border security — Democrats have voted for more than that in the past — married up with the Bridge Act, which Sen. Durbin and I wrote, a three-year, one-time renewable work permit for the DACA population of about 700,000,” he said. “We have about 400,000 TPS people who came here from natural disasters and war-torn countries decades ago, their visas are running out. So basically $5 billion for the wall plus the Bridge Act, TPS, and some legal changes to do away with some of these magnets to illegal immigration might save the day in the Senate.”
The South Carolina Republican, however, didn’t directly respond to repeated questions about why the deal he outlined would work now when similar efforts had failed in the past.
Graham, who is set to become the next Senate Judiciary Committee chairman when the new Congress is seated next month, also promised Sunday to investigate the deaths of two migrant children while in government custody.
He said in the same interview that he will have lunch with President Trump on Sunday and will ask the commander in chief to reconsider his Syria troops pullout.
