Flake/Durbin/Gardner Plan: Amnesty for Millions or Shut Down Government

An expansive amnesty plan for millions of illegal aliens, being led by Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and his Democrat and Republican establishment allies, would annually give U.S. citizenship to 25,000 foreigners with Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

The Gang of Six amnesty plan is being pushed by Flake, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO), Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ). The pro-open borders Senators want to see the amnesty slipped into a spending bill that would fund the federal government, threatening a shutdown if it is not included.

Despite being told by President Trump that he would not sign off on any amnesty legislation until a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border is fully funded and legal immigration levels — whereby the U.S. brings in more than one million foreign nationals a year — are greatly reduced to relieve working and middle-class communities of the immigration burden and raise the wages of American workers, the six Senators have pushed their plan anyway.

Under the Gang of Six amnesty, at least 3.5 million illegal aliens who are eligible and enrolled in the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) would be given amnesty, along with their parents who originally brought them to the country illegally.

On top of the amnesty for DACA-enrolled and DACA-eligible illegal aliens, the Gang of Six plan would annually provide amnesty to 25,000 foreign nationals currently or previously in the U.S. on the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program.

TPS is a federal program that allows foreign nationals from specific countries that have been devastated, usually by natural disasters, to have a temporary stay in the U.S. until their native country is revived. Until the Trump administration, TPS programs for countries like Haiti and El Salvador were regularly extended, with the program becoming a quasi-amnesty for foreign nationals.

The Gang of Six amnesty would gradually allow all of those foreign nationals on TPS to permanently stay in the U.S., despite the program never being intended to keep foreign populations in the country.

Such a maneuver would mean that the roughly 200,000 El Salvadorans who had their TPS terminated by the Trump administration would be able to apply for the 25,000 visas allotted in the Gang of Six amnesty plan to try to stay in the U.S. permanently.

Earlier this week, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) — Trump’s closest populist ally in the Senate — mocked the “Gang of Six” amnesty plan, saying that the proposal should be thrown “straight into the trash can,” as Breitbart News reported.

Likewise, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen have slammed the Gang of Six amnesty as being dead on arrival, with Sessions calling it “totally unjustifiable.”