Hours after Donald Trump plunged congressional Republicans into chaos by declaring his opposition to their carefully negotiated immigration proposal, the White House announced he would support the effort.
House Republican leaders had planned to hold votes next week on two immigration measures: a hardline proposal authored by the House judiciary committee chairman, Bob Goodlatte, and a plan touted as a compromise between the moderate and conservative factions of the Republican party.
“I’m looking at both of them,” Trump said during an interview with Fox and Friends on Friday morning. “I certainly wouldn’t sign the more moderate one.”
But by Friday afternoon the White House had reversed course and said the president supported both measures.
“The President fully supports both the Goodlatte bill and the House leadership bill,” the White House deputy press secretary, Raj Shah, said in a statement. “In this morning’s interview, he was commenting on the discharge petition in the House, and not the new package. He would sign either the Goodlatte or the leadership bills.”
The discharge petition refers to an effort led by a group of rebellious Republicans who attempted to circumvent House leadership in an effort to force a series of immigration votes and win protections for young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers.
That rebellion was averted when the House speaker, Paul Ryan, agreed to hold votes next week on the two immigration bills.
Trump’s commitment to sign either bill should inject new life into the effort that appeared certain to fail without the president’s support.
Immigration hardliners prefer the more conservative proposal but had signaled an openness to consider the alternative measure, which strictly adheres to Trump’s vision for a sweeping overhaul of the US immigration system. Without the president’s endorsement, that bill almost certainly would not have been able to win over enough conservatives to pass the House.
The president’s morning remarks upended weeks of delicate negotiations between House moderates and conservatives. They had been seeking an agreement linking protections for Dreamers, whose fate is in limbo, with billions of taxpayer dollars for a border wall and new restrictions on legal immigration. On Friday morning, it was unclear if the House still planned to vote on a pair of immigration measures next week.
Why are families being separated at US border?
Why are children being separated from their families?
In April 2018, the US attorney general, Jeff Sessions, announced a “zero tolerance” policy under which anyone who crossed the border without legal status would be prosecuted by the justice department. This includes some, but not all, asylum seekers. Because children can’t be held in adult detention facilities, they are being separated from their parents.
Immigrant advocacy groups, however, say hundreds of families have been separated since at least July 2017.
More than 200 child welfare groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the United Nations, said they opposed the practice.
What happens to the children?
They are supposed to enter the system for processing “unaccompanied alien children”, which exists primarily to serve children who voluntarily arrive at the border on their own. Unaccompanied alien children are placed in health department custody within 72 hours of being apprehended by border agents. They then wait in shelters for weeks or months at a time as the government searches for parents, relatives or family friends to place them with in the US.
This already overstretched system has been thrown into chaos by the new influx of children.
Can these children be reunited with their parents?
Immigration advocacy groups and attorneys have warned that there is not a clear system in place to reunite families. In one case, attorneys in Texas said they had been given a phone number to help parents locate their children, but it ended up being the number for an immigration enforcement tip line.
On the other side, advocates for children have said they do not know how to find parents, who are more likely to have important information about why the family is fleeing its home country. And if, for instance, a parent is deported, there is no clear way for them to ensure their child is deported with them.
What happened to families before?
When an influx of families and unaccompanied children fleeing Central America arrived at the border in 2014, Barack Obama’s administration detained families.
This was harshly criticized and a federal court in 2015 stopped the government from holding families for months without explanation. Instead, they were released while they waited for their immigration cases to be heard in court. Not everyone shows up for those court dates, leading the Trump administration to condemn what it calls a “catch and release” program.
As House Republicans scrambled for more details, Trump appeared to encourage the Republican immigration effort, though he did not clearly endorse either plan.
“Any Immigration Bill MUST HAVE full funding for the Wall, end Catch & Release, Visa Lottery and Chain, and go to Merit Based Immigration. Go for it! WIN!” Trump wrote on Twitter.
Weeks of negotiations among House Republicans have coincided with painful stories about children being separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border.
“I hate the children being taken away,” Trump told reporters after his interview with Fox. But he again falsely blamed his administration’s policy of forcibly removing migrant children from parents on Democrats.
“That’s the law and that’s what the Democrats gave us,” he said, adding a claim that the opposition party would not negotiate on immigration because they were “afraid of security for our country”.
There is no such law that requires the government to separate families. The increasing number of families separated at the border is largely the result of the “zero tolerance” policy, announced by Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, in which migrants entering the US illegally are referred for criminal prosecution.
Previously, the US allowed children to remain with their parents by releasing families while they awaited civil deportation proceedings. Now the administration releases the children to relatives or foster care.
Republicans touted a provision in their “compromise” immigration proposal that they said would keep families together by clarifying a 1997 court ruling that prevents undocumented children from being held in custody for long periods.
Legal experts and immigration advocates say that would still allow the administration to separate families at the border while the parents await criminal proceedings. The change would allow the administration to reunite parents and children in immigration detention facilities that house families, a controversial practice opposed by Democrats.
“There is absolutely no provision in here that says families will not be separated,” said Kerri Talbot of Immigration Hub. “The ‘zero tolerance’ policy that results in the prosecution for the parent and separation from their child remains in place.”
The House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, called the plan to, in effect, offer protection for Dreamers in exchange for funding the wall and new immigration restrictions “totally unworthy of America” and said the president’s opposition to the measure was an indicator of “how low his standards are”.
