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“He knows the challenges we face. He is with us. He told us clearly, unequivocally,” said Senator Richard Durbin, the second Democrat in the Senate, after a meeting with Biden in the Oval Office during the next step to pave the way for citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants.
Securing Biden’s vocal – and regular – support is a critical part of efforts by Democratic lawmakers to seize the opportunity to include long-sought immigration policy priorities without needing Republican backing. Several Democrats have gone so far as to say that including these proposals in the nascent $ 3.5 trillion budget proposal is critical to their overall support for the legislation, which will include key elements of Biden’s agenda to dedicate hundreds. billions of dollars in education, home and child care; and stronger and more extensive paid vacation proposals.
The move, which Biden said earlier this month his Justice Department would appeal, prevented the administration from accepting further DACA requests and called into question the fate of hundreds of thousands of youth without- papers protected by the program, which was put in place by then President Barack Obama.
The fallout added new fuel to pressure from lawmakers to permanently address the dreaming population through the broad agenda Democrats plan to go through a budget process that would allow legislation to pass in the country. Senate with a simple majority vote. For more than a decade, lawmakers have sought to find a path for bipartisan immigration reform, repeatedly failing.
“We are confident, but time is running out,” Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat from California, told reporters on Thursday. “And it’s not just important, this process, this opportunity here is really our love at first sight and it’s right – we’re so grateful that the president has reaffirmed his support for the cause, the problem and this approach. “
With the party controlling just 50 votes in the Senate and the latest iteration of bipartisan immigration reform talks stalled, lawmakers have been looking at including important elements of the reform of the immigration in the so-called reconciliation package.
“Reconciliation is the only option,” House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler, a Democrat from New York, told reporters.
The scale of the proposal is still ongoing, lawmakers said, but Democrats said they would seek to include a path to citizenship for dreamers, as well as those with temporary protected status and essential undocumented workers.
Representative Raul Ruiz, chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said the group is looking to broaden the scope of the effort, working from a series of different immigration proposals to bring together as many pieces that could fall under the Senate rules. the process. This process is currently underway as Democrats in Congress move forward on the two-track process to enact Biden’s $ 4 trillion economic program.
“There will be more collaboration to build the way to get to the yes with budgetary reconciliation in the Senate and the House working together,” Ruiz told reporters.
But it was the Senate rules that raised the question of whether immigration efforts can survive the process, even if they have sufficient Democratic support in both chambers. Lawmakers have made it clear that they are working to justify the survival of immigration measures.
“We have a strong case for why this should be included” in the reconciliation package, Ruiz said.
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