THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION is not truly interested in any "deal" on immigration. All Donald Trump wants is ... well ... everything his way and to hell with compromise.
If Donald Trump had his way, he would cut off all immigration except from Norway and the other Scandinavian countries (oh, he might allow immigration from Slovenia, the home country of his wife and her parents.)
The U.S. Senate voted today (Feb. 15) on several proposals, some clearly partisan and anti-immigrant, but a couple were the result of bipartisan talks. None of them secured the 60 votes needed to pass.
“Congress has one job right now when it comes to immigration, and that is to provide a legislative fix for a path to citizenship for 1.8 million undocumented youth known as DREAMers, including 130,000 Asian/Americans," said the Asian Americans Advancing Justice.
The only good news that came out of the votes was that Donald Trump's and the GOP plan to enshrine his four-part immigration framework came the furthest of any proposal from reaching the 60-vote margin needed for passage, failing by 39-60. The competing bipartisan agreement got rejected, 54-45, after a furious White House campaign to defeat it, including a veto threat issued before the senators cast their votes.
In the end, eight Republicans joined all but three Democrats in support of the main bipartisan proposal hammered together by Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham and Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin, which would have given an estimated 1.8 million undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship while spending $25 billion on border security.
The three Democrats who voted against the bipartisan proposal included Senators Kamala Harris, Martin Heinrich and Tom Udall, all of whom cited the hefty infusion of funding for Trump's border wall in explaining their “no” votes.
“While this bill would put Dreamers on a pathway toward citizenship, the appropriation of $25 billion for a border wall is a waste of taxpayer money,” Harris said in a news release. “A wall will not secure our border and I remain concerned those billions of dollars may also be used to implement this administration’s anti-immigrant agenda — one that targets California and its residents.”
Two other amendments were also rejected: a narrower plan with no border wall funding from Senators John McCain, R-Ariz. and Chris Coons, D-Del., on a 52-47 vote, and an anti-sanctuary cities measure from Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., went down, 54-45.
I repeat: Trump doesn't want a deal. All he wants is to ram down Congress' throat his radical immigration framework that is anti-family and anti-immigration of brown immigrants.
Less we forget, it was Trump - despite his professed love for Dreamers - who created this unnecessary crisis by declaring the end of the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program, an Obama initiative, and giving Congress until March to come up with a legislative solution. After Thursday's votes in the Senate, that solution now seems farther away than ever.
"It has been 161 days since the Trump administration manufactured this problem by suspending the DACA program," says the AAAJ statement.
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