Members of Congress will leave Washington for their holiday break on
Friday without coming to any agreement on the future of Deferred Action
for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program that shielded from
deportation some seven hundred thousand undocumented immigrants who came
to the U.S. as children. President Trump, in a concession to his
anti-immigrant base, cancelled the program in September. But he also
knew that DACA and its beneficiaries, known as Dreamers, are broadly popular among Americans. To minimize the political fallout from the
cancellation, Trump called on lawmakers to pass legislation to restore
the protections he had just ended. He set a deadline of March 5th for
Congress to act. “Trump created this crisis, set a date to push
recipients off of a cliff, and then left it to Congress to prevent it,”
Cecilia Muñoz, a former Obama official who helped develop the DACA policy, told me.
Members of both parties have vowed to fix DACA, but a concrete plan
still hasn’t materialized. While the delays continue, more than a hundred Dreamers are losing their status every day, meaning, among other things, that they can no longer work
legally in the U.S. The Democrats had promised to pass legislation
before the end of the year to resolve the situation. And, despite a
Republican-controlled Congress, they had leverage: Republicans need
their votes in order to pass measures to continue to fund the
government. Earlier this year, some high-profile Democratic
senators—including Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory
Booker—expressed willingness to withhold those votes and force a
government shutdown over DACA. This week, however, it became clear that
Democratic leaders weren’t yet willing to go that far. On Thursday,
Congress passed a resolution to continue funding the government into
January. In theory, this will give the Democrats another chance to tie DACA to a future spending bill. But it nevertheless seemed like the
Democrats had blinked. One immigrants-rights advocate told me, “At the
end of the day, the Democrats always take the immigrant community for
granted, and it’s the Dreamers who are shortchanged.”
The most likely path forward, if there is one, will be for Congress to
pass a stand-alone measure to protect Dreamers. The template for such
legislation would be the DREAM Act, a bill that has been introduced in
the Senate more than five times since 2001, which would create a path to
citizenship for Dreamers. Some veterans of immigration-policy battles in
Washington, however, are skeptical that such a bill could pass in an
election year. One former Republican congressional aide with years of
experience on immigration issues told me that Democrats should have
pressed harder to include a DACA fix in a spending bill this year. “The
Democrats wouldn’t have been held accountable for a shutdown, anyway,”
the aide said. “And, politically, they have all the leverage. It’s the
Republicans who are trying not to upset their base and to protect their
moderates. I’m not sure the Democrats pushed this as far as they could
have.” Dreamers and their advocates also feel a critical opportunity may
be passing. “We’ll keep fighting, but if a DREAM Act isn’t passed this
year, it definitely becomes harder in 2018,” Kamal Essaheb, of the
National Immigration Law Center, told me.
Trump’s DACA deadline coincides with congressional primary season. Many
incumbent Republicans will need to shore up their bases of support on
the right, and others will be facing Steve Bannon-inspired conservative
challengers; they won’t want to appear too conciliatory on a contentious
issue like immigration. “Everything’s harder in an election year,” the
former congressional aide said. “If, this week, we were talking about
tax reform, a DACA fix, and funding the government, it would divide
people’s attention on the big issues. In February, everyone will be
talking about DACA.” Last week, the White House announced that it would
launch an aggressive new campaign, starting in 2018, to sway the public
on the need to limit legal immigration. It’s a hard-line position that
only the most conservative faction of the Republican Party supports, but
it will heighten the pressure for Republicans open to a DACA fix.
What a viable DREAM Act would look like still isn’t clear, either.
Republicans will not support legislation unless it includes a raft of
border-security measures, but Democrats remain adamant that many of
these requests are too extreme. Immigration advocates have repeatedly
called for a “clean DREAM Act”—a version of the bill that would make
only limited concessions to enforcement and security measures. There is
some middle ground that the two parties have staked out before, in 2013,
when they were working toward a bigger deal on comprehensive immigration
reform. Senator Dick Durbin, of Illinois, the Democrat who originally
sponsored the DREAM Act in 2001, has been trying to gather support for a
deal that would give protections to Dreamers in exchange for increases
in the number of federal border agents and expanded funding for
border-security technology. But he has not yet been able to secure
enough Republican votes to get the bill through the Senate. In the
House, a growing number of moderate Republicans who are facing tough
reëlection fights—such as Ryan Costello, of Pennsylvania, and Scott
Taylor, of Virginia—have expressed support for bipartisan negotiations,
but they’ve yet to offer specifics. Earlier this month, thirty-four
Republicans signed a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan, urging him to
act before the end of the year. “This is not a threat to leadership,”one of them said afterward. “If you talk to the average Republican in the House, they
want to get something done,” the former aide said. “But the amount of
pressure they’re feeling will also depend on whose district you’re in.”
On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of senators met at the White House with
John Kelly, the President’s chief of staff and the former head of the
Department of Homeland Security, to discuss a potential deal. One of the
attendees was Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican, who said afterward
that Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, had promised him there
would be a vote on the Dreamer issue by mid-January, before Congress
will hold another vote to continue to fund the government. Durbin
attended the meeting, as did Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina
Republican co-sponsoring the DREAM Act. Also in attendance were the
Republicans Tom Cotton and David Perdue, who last winter sponsored a
bill that would cut legal immigration.
In early December, a group of Dreamers set up a large white tent across
from Paul Ryan’s office on the National Mall, in Washington, D.C.
Inside, they have created what one of them, a twenty-six-year-old DACA recipient named Adrian Reyna, who works for an immigrant-led group
called United We Dream, described to me as a “war room.” Each day,
hundreds of Dreamers gather there to plan public actions—rallies,
sit-ins at lawmakers’ offices, press conferences. When Reyna and I
spoke, on Tuesday, he and his colleagues were scheduled to visit
thirty-five congressional offices that day. “We walk in, with sleeping
bags and everything,” Reyna told me. “We go up to the staffer at the
front desk and say, ‘Hi, I’m from your state, and I would qualify for
the DREAM Act.’ You get the standard answer, which is, ‘Sorry, you
should set up a meeting.’ At that point, people drop their sleeping bags
and stay there.” When one group visited the office of Senator Bill
Nelson, a Democrat from Florida who has publicly supported attaching
some version of the DREAM Act to the funding negotiations, he came
outside to chat. The group asked him if he would withhold his vote to
fund the government in order to secure a “clean” DREAM Act. “Nelson
wouldn’t commit,” Reyna told me. “He called Durbin on the phone, to show
that he’s friends with Durbin, to try to appease us. But we’re past the
lip service. Our people know better by now.”