House Speaker Paul Ryan said the GOP is taking another shot at working with President Trump on an immigration bill that secures the border and provides a solution for so-called Dreamers who came to the U.S. illegally as children.
Top House GOP leaders met with Trump on Tuesday at the White House to discuss a plan, which was prompted by a rogue effort from some lawmakers to force a vote on immigration reform.
“We want to advance something that has a chance of becoming law, that has the president’s support,” Ryan, R-Wis., said Wednesday.
Trump said he would back a bill that includes strong border security, limits to chain migration and reforms to the visa entry program. He also backs a pathway to citizenship for the Dreamers.
[Related: Immigration deal as unlikely as ever: ‘DACA is probably on ice for a long time’]
The meeting came just as a group of GOP lawmakers is working with Democrats to gather enough signatures to force the House to take up a group of immigration bills that range from conservative to moderate.
Ryan opposes the move because he said it would effectively give control of the floor to Democrats and risk the House passing the the Dream Act, a plan favored by most Democrats, which would legalize the Dreamers now participating in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program without any new border security.
Republicans are divided on which immigration plan to support.
“Members of our majority fall into different camps,” Ryan said. “They want a solution to DACA and on the border and on security issues. We want to accommodate all that. We are working on it.”
The new push on immigration comes weeks after the Senate failed to advance immigration reform legislation. Lawmakers have generally become less interested in tackling the thorny issue now that the courts have blocked Trump administration efforts to curtail the DACA program, which was never passed as legislation but was created unilaterally by President Obama.
