Congress to return from break with no clear path on a DREAMer solution

Eliza Collins | USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Congress is set to return to Washington this week, but don’t expect votes on a solution for the undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, some of whom could start being deported as early as next month.

The Senate is scheduled to vote on President Trump's judicial and administration nominees, while House Republican leaders are still trying to find enough votes to pass a party-line immigration bill that has almost no chance of passing through the Senate, where it will have to gain a 60-vote majority to avoid a promised Democratic filibuster.

What was supposed to be a week of free-flowing immigration debate earlier this month sparked and then quickly fizzled, after the Senate failed to advance four pieces of immigration legislation in just a couple of hours.

Then they broke for a week-long recess. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he would bring up immigration legislation in the future — but only if it was guaranteed to pass and that Trump would support it. In the meantime, he said, the Senate was moving onto other business.

Congress is struggling to reach a compromise to give legal certainty for the immigrants whose parents brought them to the United States as children. In the fall, Trump ended an Obama-era program that protected nearly 800,000 of the “DREAMers” from deportation. He gave Congress until March 5 to find a solution.

The urgency has been blunted a bit after a federal judge in California ordered the Department of Homeland Security to resume the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The department is now operating DACA until the Supreme Court weighs in. That means the program — which protects some but not all of the DREAMers — may survive until sometime this summer, the earliest the court could rule, even without congressional action.

Bipartisan support exists for some form of legal protection for DREAMers, but fights over who should be protected, to what level and what should be included in the overall deal has forced Congress to a standstill.

Following the failed votes in the Senate, Republican Whip John Cornyn of Texas said the best option may be to add temporary protections for DACA recipients onto the next must-pass spending bill.

Trump has proposed providing a path to citizenship for 1.8 million DREAMers. But in exchange he wants $25 billion to pay for a wall along the southern border and changes that would cut at least 25% from the current number of legal immigrants.

That plan failed 39-60 in the Senate last week, not even getting support from all of the 51 Senate Republicans. Another bill, co-sponsored by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, failed 54-45. Even if that bill had passed, the White House threatened to veto it.

The president has also endorsed another immigration bill, this one in the House, that would provide narrower protections to less than 800,000 DACA recipients — requiring them to renew their status every three years — and a broader list of immigration limits than were included in the Senate bill Trump liked.

Democrats oppose the House bill, and it currently lacks enough support from Republicans to pass without any Democratic votes. Some moderate Republicans believe it goes too far.

In the House, GOP Whip Steve Scalise has co-sponsored Securing America's Future Act and is encouraging lawmakers to get on board. His office said next week will be focused on building support for the bill. But so far, there is no scheduled vote on the legislation.

Arizona Republican Rep. Martha McSally, an original co-sponsor of the bill, told USA TODAY she is “pretty optimistic that we can get this bill to a place where we can get it to the floor.”

“Now that the Senate has failed, it's our opportunity in the House to put out there a unifying proposal from the majority party,” she continued.

Contributing: Alan Gomez