It’s do-or-die time

Senators to Trump: It’s do-or-die time on DACA

A small group of bipartisan senators has been holding back-channel talks in the hopes of reviving a deal. But it’s a tall order.

By BURGESS EVERETT and ELANA SCHOR

Cory Gardner, the leader of the Senate GOP’s campaign arm, delivered an urgent message to President Donald Trump in a telephone conversation earlier this month: Congress and the White House need to act pronto on immigration reform.

“The sweet spot for getting an immigration deal remains now. The closer we get to the election and certainly post-election, the more difficult it will be,” the Colorado Republican recounted telling the president. “If we wait longer, the more difficult it becomes. They’ll blame it on both parties at that point.”

A group of senators in both parties is beginning to restart back-channel talks across the aisle and with the White House in hopes that the chamber will be ready to act if the House or the courts throw the issue back to the Senate this summer. But the Senate isn’t ready to take up the issue after a thoroughly unproductive immigration debate in February, followed by months of radio silence.

And lawmakers are growing more and more worried the upper chamber could be blindsided by a call to action later this year.

The House, meanwhile, has become a hotbed of immigration debate — and it’s preparing to take up one or several Republican bills in June. But even if the GOP is able to resolve its intense disagreements and pass something, the Senate is very unlikely to accept it, according to interviews with nearly a dozen senators of both parties. Their opposition extends from a conservative bill written by House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.). to a more moderate one pushed by centrist House Republicans.

And urgency is cranking up from the outside as well. Republican donors are putting increasing pressure on the party to follow through on immigration reform, and the Koch brothers' political network is calling for the GOP to take the Democrats' trade of protections for Dreamers in exchange for border security.

Yet the Senate does not have its own proposal that can get 60 votes right now. The possibility that the chamber will be caught flat-footed — after leading the debate for years — is starting to alarm senators from both parties.

“Either the House sends us something or the court sends us something and suddenly we have to do something,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.). “I don’t want to be standing there saying we’ve been doing nothing for months.”

“That pressure could ramp back up tomorrow if we’re in a position where we see active deportations of Dreamers on a large scale,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.). “There are many Republican senators who realize that that is not a place they should ever want us to be.”

The conservative Lankford and liberal Heinrich both voted against the Senate’s bipartisan efforts in February. The bill would have provided 1.8 million young immigrants with a pathway to citizenship and delivered $25 billion for Trump’s border wall. Both are involved in nascent bipartisan talks that have restarted recently. And they’re precisely the type of lawmakers who will have to be on board for the chamber to pass anything.

In recent weeks, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) has been taking the lead on talking to Lankford and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), two more junior GOP senators who are widely viewed as bellwethers of Republican support for immigration reform. While senators say that the staples of any immigration deal are protections for Dreamers and money for border security, negotiations have broadened to include the expiring protected status for hundreds of thousands of Central American immigrants.

Coons, one of Lankford’s Democratic partners in recent informal immigration discussions, described the talks as “a cautious exploration of ways to broaden” the debate.

The Trump administration’s handling of the Temporary Protected Status program has created a population of people “who’ve been in this country legally for a decade or more facing imminent deportation,” Coons said. “If we could find a way to reform the TPS program to include significant congressional engagement or oversight, that might put a new issue on the table.”

Senators working on the issue acknowledge it’s a long shot, and both party whips said that Democratic and Republican leaders are largely sitting back and watching what happens in the House before making a move. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he will not commit another week of the Senate’s time to immigration after the February exercise, but he added the Senate might take legislation if the president is supportive and it can pass the House.

But that means senators need to bear down on the issue soon to have any hope of moving and whipping support from senators in both parties. Both the president’s bill and a bipartisan bill led by Sens. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) and Angus King (I-Maine) fell short of 60 votes in February, raising the question of whether anything can pass the chamber even if the House or courts force the issue.

“We need to begin to work on the wall that the president wants,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.). “The Democrats are going to have to realize that we need 70 votes, not 60. Their view of a bipartisan deal is you get all the Democrats and a handful of Republicans.”

Indeed, just eight Republicans backed the Rounds-King plan in February. And King now said it will be difficult to get 46 Democratic Caucus members to support another bill combining border security and protections for the Dreamers.

“It would be hard to get Democratic votes for that again today. That was a hard call at the time,” King said.

That puts more pressure on Lankford and Tillis to introduce a proposal with Democratic support that can win over the majority of more centrist members in each conference.

Still, since those February votes, Tillis said he’s held immigration talks “almost weekly.”

“There’s a number of us who, on a bipartisan basis, are meeting — our staff are meeting and talking,” Tillis said. “I still think there’s a path.”

The path is an exceedingly narrow one, participants on all sides acknowledge. The Senate is scheduled to be in for just four more work periods this year, and it’s expected to take a break for several weeks before the fall election. Plus, McConnell has been prioritizing noncontroversial legislation like a veterans care bill and water infrastructure plan, as well as confirmation of judges, over contentious issues like immigration.

Democrats are also worried about the president's influence. He put heavy pressure on Republicans to reject anything other than his plan to make deep cuts to legal immigration as a price for citizenship for Dreamers, and Democrats worry that will happen again in the coming weeks.

"I don’t know that we’ve figured out: How do you create the dynamic for this to happen with this president?" Heinrich said.

But most senators believe that the political prospects for immigration aren’t likely to improve in the future, as the election approaches and Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Actions for Childhood Arrivals program wends through the courts. That means that if the issue lands in their lap in June or July, senators want to have something to put up that has a prayer on the Senate floor.

“We’re still trying to swap paper and figure out how to get there,” Lankford said. “The important thing to me is, [can we] get six of us or so ... in a bipartisan way and say: ‘That’s close enough?’”