Border Wars by Julie Hirschfeld Davis & Michael D. Shear

Author:Julie Hirschfeld Davis & Michael D. Shear
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

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The shutdown was short-lived; before long, Schumer caved and agreed to a spending agreement, and McConnell committed to holding a series of votes in the coming days on legislation to codify DACA. But there was still no consensus on what that bill should look like.

The Number Twos negotiations were at a standstill, and everyone was frustrated—the lawmakers, their aides, the White House officials who were sitting in listening to the same conversations over and over. One afternoon in McCarthy’s office, John Kelly broke the monotony. The chief of staff had said little in most of these sessions, but on that Tuesday, he chimed in as Durbin made the case that they should help as many Dreamers as possible with whatever plan they came up with. A pathway to citizenship should be available not just to the 690,000 people who had DACA permits, Durbin said, but also for the more than one million others who were eligible but had never received them. “Because they were too lazy to get off their asses and apply,” Kelly groused from his end of the table. Durbin was taken aback. Steny Hoyer, the House Democratic whip, took exception. That’s no way to talk about these kids, he said. Besides, the Democrats told him, Kelly was wrong. The reason many eligible people did not have DACA protections was because when the program was created they were too young to receive a permit. It had nothing to do with being lazy. The spat was yet another reminder, as if it were needed, that a compromise was not in the offing. Kelly left the session and repeated the “lazy” comment to reporters waiting outside, drawing outrage from Democrats and immigrant advocacy groups.

As the date McConnell had set for a DACA debate approached, Trump appeared to be backing away from a bipartisan deal. He was insisting on his “four pillars”—DACA protections, wall funding, eliminating the diversity visa lottery, and ending chain migration—and Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, produced a bill that mirrored the wish list. The Common Sense Coalition was toiling quietly to finalize its own plan, which would pair $25 billion in border wall funding with a path to citizenship for 1.8 million Dreamers. It was a fragile compromise—one that demanded that Democrats embrace a wall their core supporters detested and Republicans accept an amnesty their base reviled—but after weeks of negotiations, the group believed they had the sixty votes necessary to push it through the Senate, even over the president’s objections.

All that changed late on the night of Valentine’s Day, the eve of the Senate vote, when the Common Sense Coalition unveiled its final legislative language. At around 10 p.m., top officials at DHS who were running a legislative war room from the department’s office in the Ronald Reagan Building several blocks from the Capitol received the text of the Coalition’s bill—what was being called the “Schumer-Collins-Rounds” measure, named for three of the lead sponsors, including the Senate Democratic leader,

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