Federal budget battle over immigration

Border wall prototypes get no funding.

REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS neared agreement on a $1.3 trillion spending bill today (March 21) that undercuts Donald Trump’s $25 billion request for a wall along the Mexican border and turned down his administration’s request for increased funding for immigrant detention facilities and additional border patrol agents.

At the center of the debate is the huge increase sought by the Donald Trump administration for the Department of Homeland Security to build Trump's Damn Wall, expand the number of beds for immigrant detainees and to hire more federal agents to patrol U.S. borders and the increasing the ICE raids in the nation's interior.

Unfortunately, efforts to protect young immigrants known as “Dreamers” have fallen to the wayside, according to several reports, but Democrats appeared likely to sign off on $1.6 billion in border wall funding, albeit with certain conditions, The Washington Post reported, citing anonymous sources.

Congress has until Friday, March 23, to work out how to fund the government for the next six months or face another government shutdown.

Democrats, whose votes in the Republican-controlled Congress are needed to pass the spending bill, are pushing back against the $25-billion Damn Wall that they see as a waste of money.

Interestingly, there is no resolution for the DACA program in the budget debate. Trump blames the Democrats for opposing a legislative solution to the fate of 700,000 to 800,000 Dreamers.

Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, called Trump a liar said it's not true that Democrats are not helping to end the standoff over the fate of Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program recipients — undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.

“The President constantly accuses the Democrats for not supporting DACA when he's the one who created the crisis to begin with and he's the one who defeated the bipartisan bill that would have protected 1.8 million Dreamers,” said Hirono. “But you know, we all know that he lies every single day, so that's that.”

More than likely, court orders to maintain the DACA program until Congress could come up with a bipartisan solution, have reduced the urgency for legislative action. especially when its fate is linked Trump's immigration reform proposals, Trump bogged down the efforts for a DACA resolution when he linked the program's fate with his radical immigration reform proposals.

Although during the election campaign candidate Trump claimed that the wall would cost only $12 billion, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) internal report in February put the cost at $21.6 billion, but even that may be a major underestimate if you factor in the legal costs of lawsuits by civil rights groups and private landowners along the border.

A coalition of 83 Latino, African/American and Asian/American members of the House of Representatives also wrote this week to congressional leaders urging them to “reduce funding to DHS’s detention and deportation machine.”

Republicans need to weigh the cost of Trump's border war vs. the massive increases to the national debt, the latter of which most GOP congressional representatives campaign against.

Republican leaders need Democratic votes in both chambers to pass the bill so Democrats have some leverage. They have rejected calls for increased funding for detention facilities and 850 more Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent.

According to Roll Call sources, there wouild be a $1.6 down payment for a border barrier but it would be for “fencing” only, not a concrete wall, and would provide for just 33 miles of new barriers, not the prototypes inspected by Trump last week amidst fanfare and protests at the California-Mexico border.

Trump lost out on his bid for more money to house 10,000 more undocumented immigrants in detention facilities and to hire 850 more Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents. The measure also would not cut off federal funds for so-called sanctuary cities that do not cooperate with federal authorities on immigration law.

Additionally, the budget measure, as of Wednesday, would not cut federal funding for sanctuary cities and states, jurisdictions that limit cooperation with ICE officials despite Trump's heated rhetoric against California's status as a "sanctuary" state.

There are other major items in the budget, which is beginning to look like a bipartisan bill.  That's something Trump needs to realize, in business, the art of the deal is a  win-lose situation all the time. In politics, the art of the deal via compromise, is to reach a position where it is win-win.
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