For a town accustomed to punting major policy issues, the Trump administration’s boot of DACA to Congress could nab it a Pro Bowl nod.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Tuesday that the Homeland Security department was rescinding the Obama-era policy granting deportation deferrals and employment authorization to certain illegal immigrant children. But the timetable for winding down the program is staggered: Current DACA beneficiaries will be unaffected until the end of their work permits, and DHS will receive and consider renewal requests until early October for those whose eligibility expires before March 6, 2018. Deferred action runs for two years.
In the intervening time, Sessions invited lawmakers to replace DACA—“should it so choose.” Many Republicans sound like they’ll RSVP, even though Congress is swamped in the short-term with myriad spending issues and presumably sees tax reform on the horizon.
“It is my hope that the House and Senate, with the president’s leadership, will be able to find consensus on a permanent legislative solution that includes ensuring that those who have done nothing wrong can still contribute as a valued part of this great country,” House speaker Paul Ryan said in a statement shortly after Sessions concluded his remarks.
The question, of course, is how. A moderate idea could be a stricter version of the bipartisan DREAM Act first proposed in 2001, which provided a path to citizenship for the types of individuals, or “Dreamers,” covered by DACA. Companion plans from Rep. Carlos Curbelo and Sen. Thom Tillis would apply to certain immigrants who entered the United States illegally at age 16 or younger before 2012. In Curbelo’s bill, high school graduates or equivalents who are accepted to a college or have a work permit would have to progress through a five-year period of conditional permanent resident status, during which they graduated from higher education, worked for four years, or served on active duty for three. They then would receive a second five-year term and the ability to apply for citizenship. Tillis’s bill is said to be similar.
Another idea would be to use DACA as a bargaining chip. Sen. Tom Cotton floated the idea of pairing his legislation to curtail “chain migration”—immigrants settled in the U.S. can sponsor relatives who want to come here— with legalizing Dreamers. In a different example, Politico reported that a “number of senior House Republican sources” said there could be a deal to codify DACA in exchange for funding the president’s proposed border wall. Neither proposal is palatable to Democrats, notwithstanding Trump’s seemingly flexible definition of a “wall.”
There also is the case of some on the right who have criticized the very policy of DACA, not just its constitutionality—including the attorney general himself.
“The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things, contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences,” he said Tuesday. “It also denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens.” Such a point is tough to prove. But the tech industry-backed group FWD.us and Center for American Progress released research last month showing that 91 percent of the nearly 800,000 DACA beneficiaries had found work since Obama’s order in 2012, all of whom would exit the economy if the policy weren’t preserved.
Most of Sessions’s argument against DACA, however, focused on maintaining the rule of law. Congressional Republicans agree on that. But a legislative replacement for DACA is another matter.
