President Trump’s decision to end former President Obama’s executive order granting amnesty to illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children has put House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and other members of the GOP congressional leadership — who firmly opposed the order when Obama was in office — in a tricky situation.
The decision, announced Tuesday by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program is certain to provoke fury from Democrats and nervousness from some Republican lawmakers who have spent the Obama years opposing DACA but now have to live up to that claim.
Trump’s repeal will be accompanied by a six-month delay to allow Congress to pass legislation to keep the spirit of the Obama-era order alive should it so choose. It means the impetus and the accountability for what should happen to those approximately 800,000 illegal immigrants are now on Congress’ shoulders — and particularly with Republican leadership.
While Trump’s America First base has opposed DACA on the basis that those in the country illegally — through their own fault or not — should not be given residency or citizenship, some Republican lawmakers have tried to have their cake and eat it, too, by opposing the order as “unconstitutional” and an abuse of executive power.
Such a move has allowed them to say to red meat conservatives that they “oppose DACA” while really only doing so on a constitutional legal basis and while dodging the question of what to do with the “DREAMers.”
Trump’s decision changes that and forces individual members of Congress and Republican leadership to be accountable and tell voters whether they support granting amnesty to hundreds of thousands of adult illegal aliens. (The average age of a “DREAMer” is roughly 25.)
Speaker Ryan opposed DACA when Obama was in office, and the 2016 Republican Party platform called for the “unlawful amnesties” of DACA and DAPA to be “immediately rescinded”: “The executive amnesties of 2012 and 2014 are a direct violation of federal law and usurp the powers of Congress as outlined in Article I of the Constitution. These unlawful amnesties must be immediately rescinded by a Republican president.”
But now things have changed, and Republican lawmakers — including Ryan — have been getting visibly nervous.
“I actually don’t think he should do that,” Ryan said in an interview last week when asked if Trump should repeal DACA.
“There are people that are in limbo, that don’t know any other country, who were brought here by their parents and don’t know another home,” Ryan said, calling for Congress to give them “peace of mind.”
He isn’t the only one; at least 18 Republicans in Congress have said publicly they want DACA to remain in place, and that number is only likely to rise.
Now, with Trump’s move, it remains to be seen if Ryan and his fellow Republican lawmakers will jettison a key promise to the voters — as they did over the summer with Obamacare — or if they will keep their commitments to the conservative base they so eloquently courted in the 2014 midterms in particular.
“Now the hot potato’s back in their lap,” one anonymous lobbyist told CNN, adding:
Some Republicans would welcome the opportunity to show they’re pro-Latino and do something on this, but on the other hand some would be just as happy to say “hell no, we’re not doing this because it’s amnesty.” And so we’ve got Ryan in the hot seat figuring out where’s his base and where does he go.
The establishment Republican Party has long been dazzled by a pro-amnesty approach to immigration, tempted in part by the immense corporate lobby and donor class in Washington, DC, pushing for cheaper labor and the mirage of a potentially decisive Latino voting bloc turning Republican.
In 2012, the Republican National Committee released its now infamous “autopsy” in which it called for Republican candidates to embrace “comprehensive immigration reform.” Yet Trump won a decisive victory (and a greater share of the Latino vote) by making a tough stance on illegal immigration the core of his campaign.
Trump’s DACA repeal now puts Ryan and other GOP leaders in the hot seat and asks whether the Republican Party is one that keeps its promises — or buckles under the pressure of Democratic outrage and media groupthink.
Adam Shaw is a Breitbart News politics reporter based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY.
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