Washington
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., announced plans to vote on Thursday on the Trump-backed legislation that would reopen the government and provide $5.7 billion in taxpayer funding for new walls along the U.S.-Mexico border, while making a series of changes to the immigration system.
The Senate also will vote on Thursday on a stopgap spending bill to reopen the government through Feb. 8 without funding Trump’s wall, a measure Democrats support.
But both votes looked likely to fall short of the 60 votes needed to advance, leaving the weeks-long government shutdown no closer to resolution.
Democrats have blocked the new wall funding that Trump has made a precondition for funding the government, and the impasse has caused the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. The partial government shutdown entered its second month on Tuesday, and 800,000 federal workers face missing a second consecutive paycheck Friday.
Hoping to entice some Democrats to support the new Senate GOP proposal, Trump offered a 3-year pause in his efforts to end immigration rules that shield some immigrants from deportation. The rules are a Democratic priority, as they protect the “dreamers,” a group that includes 700,000 young people brought illegally to the United States as children who won temporary deportation protections under the Obama-era program formally known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
But the Supreme Court on Tuesday weakened Trump’s offer, saying it would take no action on lower court rulings that had blocked Trump from ending DACA. If the high court sticks to its normal procedures, the earliest it could rule would be in early 2020.
With the court seemingly keeping the program safe for at least a year, Trump’s promises to suspend his efforts to try to end it became less appealing to lawmakers who already were skeptical.
McConnell praised the new plan in a Senate floor speech on Tuesday, saying: “To reject this proposal, Democrats would have to prioritize political combat with the president ahead of federal workers, ahead of DACA recipients, ahead of border security, and ahead of stable and predictable government funding. Is that really a price that Democrats want to pay to prolong this episode, which they say they want to be over and done with?”
But Democratic opposition to Trump’s offer further solidified on Monday night when, after the GOP released the Senate legislation, lawmakers and immigration activists discovered it contains stringent new limits on the U.S. asylum program.
The legislation specifies that children younger than 18 from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala cannot apply for asylum at the U.S. border, and instead would be turned away, because of a new requirement that they apply from their home country. The law also would create a new cap of 15,000 on the number of children who could qualify each year for the asylum program.
Additionally, the legislation says children who qualify for this program can do so only if they have a U.S.-based guardian to care for them. Immigration experts said the changes would effectively bar Central American minors arriving at U.S. borders from access to asylum, and Democrats described them as a deal-killer.
“The legislation includes incredibly partisan changes to our asylum system that make it nearly impossible for migrants to claim asylum at our border, a dramatic change in what America has been all about,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor. “The asylum changes are a poison pill if there ever was one, and show the lack of good faith that the president and now Leader McConnell have.”
A spokesman for McConnell’s office directed questions about the asylum changes in the legislation to the administration. White House officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Democrats’ vow to block the Senate GOP bill leaves no clear path to ending the shutdown. House Democrats aim to pass legislation this week that would reopen the government while blocking any new wall funding, but Trump has rejected similar bills repeatedly and McConnell has said the Senate won’t take them up.
The impasse has left key parts of the federal government unfunded for more than month, including the Treasury, Homeland Security, Interior, Agriculture and Justice departments. It also has threatened key government services, leaving the White House to continually attempt to find ways to keep unfunded parts of the government functioning.