House rejects Trump's immigration bill in a last-minute tweet

The House on Wednesday rejected a huge immigration bill that would have financed the border wall of President Trump, offered undocumented youth access to citizenship and addressed in part the crisis of separation of families at home. southwestern border.

The bill failed on a 301-121 vote despite a last-minute tweet of support from Trump – in all caps – support from the GOP leadership and weeks of negotiations between conservative and moderate Republicans looking for an intraparty compromise elusive.

But the GOP has been unable to bridge the gap between hardliners lined up with Trump and moderates the intention of tackling the fate of undocumented immigrants known as "dreamers".

Highlighting the persistent failure of the GOP to reach consensus on any immigration legislation, Republican badistants also said that the House would not vote this week on a narrower measure aimed at separating policy between Congress and the White House. The bill should go.

Legislators will leave for a 10-day break on July 10, taking no action amid a turmoil over the politics of separation and the haunting images of migrant children housed in metal cages.

Lawmakers spurned a tweet of Trump at the 11th hour, which urged lawmakers in block capitals to "SHOW WE WANT STRONG BORDERS AND SECURITY" by pbading the bill.

During the debate on the floor, the representative Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) Read Trump's tweet, grabbing his last exhortation to "WIN!"

"That's what we need to do today," Goodlatte said. "We must win."

But that did not succeed in influencing Republicans like Republican Warren Davidson (Ohio). David Davidson, a member of the Freedom Caucus, questioned several aspects of the bill despite laborious negotiations, including the lack of provisions for "sanctuary towns" that do not cooperate with the forces of peace. Federal order.

Many Republicans also see any bill with a path to citizenship as "amnesty."

Trump's Wednesday tweet contrasted sharply with the one he sent Friday in which he said the Republicans "should stop wasting their time on immigration" after the mid-term elections, when, he predicts, more GOP lawmakers would be elected.

Republican leaders struggled to rally support for the bill, twice postponing the vote in the face of internal opposition and Trump's uncertain support. No Democrat supported the bill, which not only funded the Wall of the Border but also rolled back the legal avenues of immigration favored by most Democrats.

"I'm going to need the president's call," said Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.)

GOP lawmakers spent more than a month participating in a protracted debate on a controversial issue that House leaders had hoped to avoid in an election year. Court rulings have delayed Trump's cancellation of the deferred action program for child arrivals, which has protected hundreds of thousands of undocumented dreamers from deportation. These court decisions have also urgently undermined the Congress to act.

But a group of moderate Republicans, frustrated by inaction, decided in May to force votes on bills, including bipartisan measures favored by most Democrats. GOP leaders have been striving to avoid the possibility for a Republican-led House to pbad a relatively liberal immigration bill by convening negotiations on an alternative written by the GOP.

The resulting legislation largely follows the principles of immigration issued by the White House in January, providing $ 25 billion for the long-sought Trump border wall, reducing legal immigration and giving young people without -papkins of the country a chance of citizenship. It would also allow migrant families to stay together in detention.

[House Republican leaders delay vote on immigration bill until next week in the face of opposition]

Before Wednesday's tweet, many Republicans complained that Trump had not been emphatic enough in his support for the bill. The House rejected a more conservative immigration bill last week after Trump visited Capitol Hill with the goal of getting at least one of the two bills across the room. But lawmakers have felt that Trump has not explicitly called for pbading the measure of compromise, leaving them free to vote only for the more conservative alternative.

Yet House lawmakers negotiated throughout the weekend trying to determine if they could add elements to the bill that would bring them closer to the pbadage.

GOP leaders tabled a 116-page amendment on Monday night that would expand temporary visas for farm workers while requiring all employers to screen their workers for legal status using the federal "E-Verify" database.

But the Conservatives continued to deny other aspects of the bill, including its central appeal to the moderates: a clear path to citizenship for the estimated 1.8 million undocumented immigrant youth who arrived in the United States. United as children.

For many Conservatives who weighed on the bill Tuesday, this represents an amnesty that they believe would only serve to encourage future illegal immigration. But this position exasperated the moderates, who spent weeks at the negotiating table, handing concessions to the Conservatives for their support.

[Analysis: On immigration, Trump keeps making life absolutely miserable for Republicans in Congress]

On Tuesday night, the House leaders decided to abandon their last amendment and go ahead of Wednesday with a vote on a bill that they hoped would fail. Two GOP badistants contacted on Wednesday morning said Trump's tweet was unlikely to change the outcome.

"Too little, too late," said one, speaking on condition of anonymity to be frank.

Another said that Trump's tweet "would certainly have been more useful literally any other day, but today."

The leaders of the GOP have stopped predicting its pbadage before Wednesday's vote. Speaking on Fox News Channel shortly before Trump's tweet, House of Commons bad Steve Scalise (R-La.) Said that there was "still a division" in the Republican ranks in the United States. about immigration.

"You could see it in the vote last week, and this week there is probably a little more division," he said on "Fox & Friends" before blaming the Democrats for stalemate: "What the Democrats want is an amnesty and it's really what it's for, and they do not want to build the wall."

Democrats have sometimes expressed willingness to negotiate funding for border security – and in some cases, border funding – in exchange for protections for dreamers, but they have generally rejected Trump's calls to reduce immigration. legal. More recently, the Trump Administration's "zero tolerance" policy on border enforcement, leading to the separation of families, has pushed Democrats to become more aggressive in their opposition.

The White House legislative director, Marc Short, said Wednesday in a separate interview with Fox News that it was "important for us to show what we stand for" regardless of the outcome of the vote.

"This vote in the House today will basically show this to the American people: Here are the principles to secure our border," he said. "It also deals with the DACA population in a very humane way."