Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on April 27 that Republicans would be unlikely to support a stand-alone bill addressing the issue of people living illegally in the United States after entering as children, nicknamed “Dreamers,” unless the legislation takes a broader swipe at resolving the border crisis.
“Well, all I can tell you is that everybody is sympathetic with the DACA issue,” McConnell said, referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an Obama-era framework that protects Dreamers from deportation.
“But, as a practical matter, given the crisis at the border ... I can’t imagine that we would take up an immigration-related bill, no matter how worthy it might be ... without insistence on our part that we address the obvious crisis at the border that is directly related to what appeared to be an invitation by the new president to come on up.”
“For years, I have supported a solution for the Dream Act population who were brought to the United States by their parents as minors,” Graham said in a statement. “I do not believe this legislation will pass and be signed into law as a stand-alone measure. I believe it will be a starting point for us to find bipartisan breakthroughs providing relief to the Dreamers and also repairing a broken immigration system,“ Graham said, adding that he looks forward to working with Durbin and others to ”find a way forward.”
Durbin, who is leading bipartisan talks on the matter, told reporters last week that he thought that any agreement on the DACA issue would need a border security component to get enough GOP buy-in to clear the Senate filibuster.
Republican lawmakers have long argued that the burgeoning crisis is a result of Biden’s move to overturn several Trump-era immigration policies that helped curbed the flow of illegal border crossings. This includes his predecessor’s cornerstone Migrant Protection Protocol, which effectively ended the problematic “catch and release” policy, significantly stemming the surge of illegal immigrants that were seen at the southern border in 2019.
The Biden administration has repeatedly said it inherited a broken immigration system that will take some time to fix, while blaming the border surge on seasonal factors and on dire conditions in immigrants’ home countries. Part of Biden’s strategy is to address the “root causes” of migration by providing aid to Central America.
The DACA program, meanwhile, has for years been a hot-button issue. It was created by an executive order signed in 2012 by former President Barack Obama, following failed immigration reform negotiations on Capitol Hill.
DACA defenders say that the recipients should not be faulted for their parents’ decision to violate U.S. immigration laws to bring them into the country. They argue that there would be a number of social and economic costs should the program end. They say many of these recipients have contributed to the U.S. economy, and removing the program would threaten the nation’s future workforce and impose massive costs to employers who currently employ these people.
For DACA opponents, the case represents an overreach of executive authority and a usurpation of Congress’s lawmaking powers. They have argued that Obama exercised unlawful executive authority to create the program and that only Congress can enact such a policy under its authority over immigration matters.
Opponents have also taken issue with the fact that DACA grants benefits to these recipients ahead of other immigrants who are toiling through legal channels to gain immigration and naturalization in the United States.
