President Trump and Republican congressional leaders have rejected multiple offers from Democrats to fund Trump’s border wall in exchange for legislation on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which the Trump administration abruptly ended in September.
In the months since the president ended those protections for immigrants brought to the country as children, there have been many, many opportunities for Congress to come together to recreate them through legislative action. They did not. Why? Because Republican leadership and the Trump White House do not want to do that—certainly not without extracting a startlingly xenophobic blow against legal immigration in exchange.
This has been the pattern. We learn from patterns or they become a cage.
And yet!
There are at least some Democrats who appear to be skeptical of this tactic, according to Politico:
Some liberals are still wary. They fear that Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) could repeat the exercise of 2013, when the Senate passed an immigration bill and the House didn’t take it up.
“It depends on whether it’s part of a must-pass bill. That is my strong preference. The goal is to have the [DREAM] Act passed,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) in an interview. “I have no confidence, zero, in Paul Ryan bringing that bill to the floor.”
If Democrats sell out undocumented immigrants and their families in exchange for good “optics” on a bipartisan deal to get the government up and running, they will lose. The choice is theirs, and they seem to be making it.