John McCain offers DACA fix that has no money for Trump border wall

Sen. John McCain is championing a bipartisan bill that would extend a pathway to citizenship for "dreamers" but would not provide money for President Donald Trump's signature wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

McCain, R-Ariz., is joining Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., to introduce a Senate version of a House bill that combines the fix for the soon-to-be-defunct Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program with other border-security measures except for wall funding.

The Uniting and Securing America (USA) Act was introduced by Reps. Will Hurd, R-Texas, and Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., and is supported by Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat now running for the Senate, among others.

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Congress is trying to come to a compromise on DACA by Thursday, when the federal government is again set to run out of money, and legislation to continue funding the government must be extended. The issues have become entwined as Trump has set March 5 as the date that DACA, which was created via executive action by then-President Barack Obama, will end.

Trump pushes border wall funding

Trump repeatedly has demanded that wall funding be part of any such deal and is demanding a $25 billion trust fund to pay for it.

"... if there is no Wall, there is no DACA," Trump wrote on Twitter last month.

Trump reiterated that theme in a new Twitter on Monday morning, in which the president wrote that any DACA compromise without "STRONG border security and the desperately needed WALL is a total waste of time."

CNN on Monday quoted an unnamed White House official as calling the McCain-Coons bill "worse" than a previously rejected bipartisan compromise negotiated by Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.

In his Jan. 30 State of the Union address, Trump laid out what he characterized as a "fair compromise" on immigration.

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Under the White House proposal, Trump is willing to agree to a 12-year path to citizenship for 1.8 million "dreamers," the young immigrants who were brought to the United States without authorization as children. In exchange, Congress would provide funding for "the border wall system" and other border upgrades, as well as the elimination of legal migration through the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program and restrictions on family-based immigration.

'It’s time we end the gridlock'

“Our legislation, which already has broad support in the House of Representatives, would address the most urgent priorities of protecting Dreamers, strengthening border security, alleviating the backlog in immigration courts, and addressing the root causes of illegal immigration," McCain, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, said Monday in a written statement. "I’m grateful to Senator Coons for his leadership and hope our colleagues will support this effort to resolve the immediate challenges before us. It’s time we end the gridlock so we can quickly move on to completing a long-term budget agreement that provides our men and women in uniform the support they deserve.”

Coons echoed McCain's message about breaking through the partisan gridlock.

“The bill I’m introducing with Senator McCain today doesn’t solve every immigration issue, but it does address the two most pressing problems we face: protecting DACA recipients and securing the border," Coons said in a written statement. "I believe there is bipartisan support for both of those things and I believe that we can reach a budget deal that increases funding for our military and important domestic programs. We need to find a way through this gridlock to get Congress working again, and this is a viable path forward.”

In a Jan. 16 essay on Medium.com, Sinema called the House USA Act "a bipartisan path forward."

"We want to protect Dreamers so they can stay with their families and contribute in the only country they’ve called home," Sinema wrote. "We want to deploy border security technologies that work and keep the drug smugglers, gunrunners, human traffickers and other criminals out. We want to provide funding for a strong national defense that keeps our country secure and Arizona families safe, and make smart investments in veterans care, education, infrastructure, and research that creates opportunity and grows our economy."

In a Sunday interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Durbin sounded pessimistic about reaching an accord this week, but he said he did not expect another partial government shutdown over the issue.

“There is not likely to be a DACA deal, though we’re working every single day on telephone calls and person to person to try to reach this bipartisan agreement,” Durbin said.

Nowicki is The Republic's national political reporter. Follow him on Twitter, @dannowicki.

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