As the Senate gears up for immigration votes today, the White House and their hardline allies are increasingly unhinged and transparent in their real motivations. They don’t really care about resolving Dreamers’ status and are quite comfortable not fixing the crisis they’ve created.
The following is a statement from Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America’s Voice:
The White House goal has been clear for some time – setting up a “heads I win, tails you lose” situation: either Stephen Miller and anti-immigrant Republicans get all of what they want in exchange for taking Dreamers hostage, or they get to scuttle protections for Dreamers and a bipartisan deal while blaming Democrats for not paying the ransom.
It’s an approach as cynical as it is harmful and transparent. Throughout this week, “senior White House aides”– who sound suspiciously like Stephen Miller – have been threatening vetoes of bipartisan Senate legislation that would couple a resolution for Dreamers with significant border security increases. Meanwhile, they advance the falsehood that their White House’s radical approach, embodied in the Grassley legislation, is a good faith compromise effort.
It’s not. It’s chock full of nativist policies that are unrelated to the crisis at hand and seek to slow or undo the demographic diversification of America. Now they’re saying “take it or leave it.”
Yesterday, in response to the details of the bipartisan Rounds-Collins bill, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a screed against the legislation, managing to work in references to 9/11 and other jaw-dropping claims that would seemed more at home in the Breitbart comments section than in departmental press statements. As Republican Senator Lindsey Graham stated in response, “DHS is intent on acting less like a partner and more like an adversary … it appears as if DHS hopes all border security proposals fail … they lost credibility.”
Democrats and some Republicans have engaged in good faith efforts to forge a bipartisan breakthrough. President Trump and his allies have not. They manufactured this crisis for Dreamers in the first place; they repeatedly contradicted themselves on what they would be willing to support; and now they seek to exploit Dreamers’ precarious futures in an attempt to ram through unacceptable policies such as the Grassley bill.
Any Senator or member of Congress who claims to care about Dreamers’ lives and futures should reject the White House approach and the larger worldview it represents.
