President Trump injected prior DACA deals with steroids when he proposed giving amnesty to almost three times more people than the Obama administration. In exchange for waiving 1.8 million children of illegal immigrants through the door, he asked for limits on legal immigration and boosting border enforcement, including building a wall.
Democrats and open border Republicans did not even nibble at the deal. Instead, they railed against any effort to limit immigration to nuclear families by ending chain migration and – again – criticized the notion of building any form of a border wall.
Not content with just biting the hand that was feeding them the overly-generous deal, the pro-amnesty crowd has thrown another idea on the table – amnesty without the security.
Today, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) introduced a bill which includes no funding for construction of border wall. The measure, he said, represents “an important starting point” on a path to a bipartisan agreement on immigration.
His Democratic co-sponsor, Chris Coons of Delaware, acknowledged as much in an interview on MSNBC saying their plan “needs more border investment” while simply moving “towards securing control of the border by 2020.”
The McCain-Coons bill is a near carbon copy of legislation offered earlier this year by Reps. Will Hurd (R-Texas) and Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.). Again, there is lots of talk of goals, studies and cost estimates and silence on addressing current needs, such as hiring more border and interior agents, background checks and enforcing existing laws.
Those on the front lines of the illegal immigration fight know that a promise made to secure the border is worth nothing.
In a letter that was critical of the Trump immigration framework, National ICE Council President Chris Crane reminded the president that negotiations are not “important starting points.”
What emerges from any negotiation, he wrote, “sets the table for our nation’s immigration enforcement policies and strategy moving forward, and any critical enforcement measures bargained away potentially leaves gaping holes in law enforcement’s ability to provide for public safety and national security.”
The cost of those holes? Ask the families of Indianapolis Colts player Edwin Jackson and his Uber driver who were killed over the weekend by a Guatemalan citizen who was driving drunk despite having been deported in 2007 and 2009.