Describing the plan as “extremely generous” but a take-it-or-leave-it proposal, White House officials said they hoped it would be embraced by conservatives and centrists in Congress as the first step in a broader effort to fix the nation’s immigration system.
Officials said the legislation would pave the way to citizenship not only for the 690,000 people who had signed up for protection under an Obama-era program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, but also for another 1.1 million unauthorized immigrants who would have qualified for the program but never applied. Trump ended the DACA program, whose protections did not include a path to citizenship, last September.
But the new plan — drafted by Stephen Miller, the president’s hard-line domestic policy adviser, and John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff — was immediately rejected by Democrats, immigration advocates and some Republicans, with some describing it as nothing but an attempt to rid the country of immigrants and shut the nation’s borders.
Republican and Democratic senators are working on a narrower immigration plan of their own. They hope that if it can pass the Senate with a strong bipartisan majority, it will put pressure on the House to pass the legislation as well.
Senate passage of a bipartisan bill could perhaps leave Trump with the take-it-or-leave-it decision.
Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Jeff Flake of Arizona — Republicans who have in the past fought against hard-line immigration policies — said the Senate was unlikely to simply accept the president’s legislation.
Members of both parties said that legislation would have a better chance of passing if it focused on legal status for DACA recipients without a dramatic crackdown on unauthorized immigrants or new restrictions on legal immigration for extended family members.
“If you start putting in all of these highly charged toxic issues, it’s just not going to work,” said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
MICHAEL D. SHEAR and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG © 2018 The New York Times