A top Republican senator has challenged Donald Trump to make “a moral decision” on the fate of hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children, part of a revamped bipartisan push to grant permanent residency to so-called “Dreamers”.
Graham was joined by Illinois senator Dick Durbin, the Democratic cosponsor of the bill who first introduced legislation of the same name 16 years ago. Their proposal, which mirrors previous legislation that failed to pass Congress multiple times, would grant legal status and a path to citizenship to undocumented immigrants if they were longtime residents of the US.“The moment of reckoning is coming,” South Carolina
senator Lindsey Graham warned the president and his Republican colleagues at a press conference Thursday to unveil a new iteration of legislation known as the “Dream Act”.
In a sign of tough odds facing the bill, the White House swiftly rejected the notion that the president would support such a measure.
“The administration has opposed the Dream Act and we are likely to be consistent in that,” said Marc Short, the White House legislative affairs director, in an off-camera briefing with reporters on Wednesday.
Graham acknowledged the president’s candidacy was rooted in a hardline approach to immigration but cast the debate as an existential question for the party that now controls the White House and both chambers of Congress.
“President Trump, you’re going to have to make a decision,” Graham said. “The campaign is over.”
“The question for the Republican party is, what do we tell people? How do we treat them?” he added. “Here’s my answer: we treat them fairly. We do not pull the rug out from under them.
Graham and Durbin have for more than a decade spearheaded prior efforts on immigration. They were most notably part of the so-called “Gang of Eight”, a bipartisan group of senators that crafted a comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2013. The measure, which would have granted a path to citizenship for the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US, overwhelmingly passed the Senate but died amid steep opposition from conservatives in the Republican-led House of Representatives.
The 2017 Dream Act, likes its predecessors, focuses on those undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children. In order to qualify for legal status, under criteria laid out in the draft text of the bill, the immigrants must pursue higher education, work lawfully for at least three years, or serve in the military. They must also undergo a background check, show proficiency in English, and pay a fee. Anyone convicted of a felony or other serious crimes would be ineligible.
“We don’t believe that young people should be held responsible for the errors or the illegal actions of their parents,” Durbin said.
“They’ve grown up pledging allegiance to this flag, singing the Star-Spangled Banner and it’s the only country they’ve ever known.”
In addition to addressing the status of Dreamers, the new legislation seeks to restore the authority of states to grant in-state tuition rates to undocumented immigrants.
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