President Trump on Wednesday threw his weight behind Sen. Chuck Grassley’s immigration plan, urging the Senate to pass the “responsible and commonsense” proposal based on the White House’s immigration priorities and threatening to veto proposals that contain further Democratic concessions.
“The Grassley bill accomplishes the four pillars of the White House framework: a lasting solution on DACA, ending chain migration, cancelling the visa lottery, and securing the border through building the wall and closing legal loopholes,” Trump said in a statement. “The overwhelming majority of American voters support a plan that fulfills the framework’s four pillars, which move us towards the safe, modern, and lawful immigration system our people deserve.”
The president also threatened to veto any bill that fails to satisfy those criteria, saying he would oppose “any short-term “Band-Aid” approach. On Tuesday, some moderate lawmakers were weighing a deal that would build a border wall and provide a pathway to citizenship for former DACA recipients, but not end extended family sponsorships or the visa lottery.
Trump’s remarks come during a raucous open immigration debate in the Senate, where lawmakers are working furiously to find an immigration compromise that can meet the chamber’s 60-vote threshold by the end of the week.
Senate Democrats accused Trump of being unwilling to abandon hardline principles to reach a compromise.
“The American people know what’s going on,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday. “They know this president not only created the problem, but seems to be against every solution that might pass because it isn’t 100 percent of what he wants.”
But White House officials argued that the Grassley package already represents a significant compromise, pointing to “dramatic concessions” like the proposed pathway to citizenship for almost 2 million people brought to the country illegally as children and the jettisoning of some immigration enforcement measures, like a nationwide E-Verify system, that were included in the White House’s original immigration proposal last fall. And they argue that ending family sponsorship is a “practical necessity” to accompany the proposed DACA amnesty.
“Under current law, if you’re a U.S. citizen, whether U.S.-born or foreign-born, you can sponsor an unlimited number of relatives to enter the country,” an administration official told reporters Wednesday. “Since each two immigrants average seven sponsorships, a legalization of two million would become a net legalization of roughly nine million.”
Many Senate Republicans seem indifferent to achieving all the White House’s priorities, giving Democrats little incentive to fold.
“The president’s going to have a vote on his concept. I don’t think it will get 60 votes.” Sen. Lindsey Graham said. “The bottom line then is—what do you do next? You can do what we’ve done for the last 35 years—blame each other. Or you can actually start fixing the broken immigration system.”
