Democratic lawmakers left a meeting with White House chief of staff John Kelly on Wednesday without any idea what kind of bipartisan compromise the president would ultimately support regarding relief for young undocumented immigrants brought into the country as children.
Congressional Hispanic Caucus members in the meeting summed it up as a “rehash” of Kelly’s old positions, with little forward progress. Kelly didn’t appear briefed on any of the bipartisan compromises cropping up in Congress that provide a pathway to citizenship for so-called Dreamers and enhance border security. Unlike previous gatherings, the conversation remained cordial and no one brought up the president’s comment that Haiti and African nations are “shithole countries.”
But no tangible consensus, timeline, or real progress was reached in the hour-long meeting.
“Based on the leadership shown today, I wasn’t terribly optimistic,” Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz. said of the meeting, adding it’s “not a good indication” when the White House chief of staff isn’t aware of the two bipartisan proposals released on the Hill.
“The meeting was a regurgitation of both sides, but I didn’t get a sense that the administration has a clear bottom line that gets us to where we need to be, certainly by the 19th,” Sen. Bob Menendez D-N.J. told reporters. “And they have a disproportionate focus on border than anything else.”
Kelly repeatedly told the Democratic members he’s new to this, according to a source in the room. Rep. Luis Gutierrez D-Ill. said Kelly pushed for a bipartisan deal that included measures the Right wing of the party — like Republican Sens. Tom Cotton and David Perdue — would want. Gutierrez communicated to Kelly that’s not how true compromises get done on Capitol Hill, saying you can’t pull from the extremes of either party.
“Unfortunately, Mr. Kelly didn’t bring a proposal and didn’t bring us a solution and a way forward,” Gutierrez said. “I thought since the general knew so well the position of the caucus that to reiterate it would not be the best use of time, but reiterate it we did.”
Gutierrez and Hispanic Caucus Chairwoman Michelle Lujan Grisham, D-N.M., stressed they were optimistic about where talks were headed and they were in a better position than before to pass a fix for the roughly 800,000 recipients of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that Trump is killing.
“Democrats cannot blink,” Gutierrez said. “Maybe we should just make Kelly president for a day so we could get this deal done.”
Kelly told reporters “both sides of the Hill” have to reach a deal on DACA.
“At end of it, as I told members, if [the] intent is for 700,000 roughly people who are covered by DACA to remain in the United States indefinitely as legal residents, that’s what the president of United States wants,” Kelly said. “But there are also issues of if we don’t do some reasonable measures to secure the southwest border and … change some of the loopholes in our laws, then five, six, seven years from now we’ll have another 700,000 people that came to the United States that have to be dealt with.”
The likelihood that an agreement is reached by the Friday deadline to fund the government, however, is slim. Republicans leaders in the House proposed a short-term continuing resolution Tuesday night that would keep the government open through Feb. 16.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi urged House Democrats to vote against the stopgap measure in the weekly caucus meeting Wednesday.
“This is an important moment for our caucus, standing up for what we know is right and to fight them,” Pelosi told members, according to an aide in the room. “And we’ll see if they have the votes to send the CR to the Senate, we’ll see.”
“But we will not give up our leverage, for our priorities and for our Dreamers,” she said.
