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With a White House preoccupied with a pissing match between the guy in the Oval Office and his former Svengali, and congressional Republicans doing what they do best—fighting among one another—prospects for a resolution are dim, leaving hundreds of thousands of Dreamers still in limbo.
The White House has not provided details to a bipartisan group of key senators on what border security and immigration restrictions they want in return for helping Dreamers, according to the negotiators, who believe that’s a major obstacle.
And in one potentially ominous sign for a deal, two Senate Republicans who had been in talks with Democrats released an unusually downcast statement about the lack of progress in the private negotiations, which began after Trump announced last fall he would kill the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. […]
Meanwhile, a small circle of House Republicans has gone rogue, preparing a conservative bill meant to strengthen Trump’s negotiating hand against Democrats, but which would have slim prospects in the Senate.
Republican Sens. James Lankford (OK) and Thom Tillis (NC) say that over "the course of the last several weeks, we have negotiated in good faith with Senate Democrats on a DACA agreement," but "our discussions on border security and enforcement with Democrats are much further apart." Which negates the first part of the quote about "good faith." And then there's this part: "Even before their statement Thursday, Tillis and Lankford had quietly stopped attending the meetings recently, according to multiple sources." That still leaves Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin (IL) and Michael Bennet (CO) in the group negotiating with Republicans Jeff Flake (AZ.), Lindsey Graham (SC), and Cory Gardner (CO).
They had apparently been making progress toward an agreement on Dream Act language to provide legalization for Dreamers, but there's a separate Republican-only working group in the Senate that hasn't signed off on that. There are the four House maniacs as well who are apparently working off of Trump's tweets to stake their far-right claim, proposals—"more robust border security, including a wall; more immigration agents; changes to policies governing asylum and unaccompanied minors who show up at the border; and cutting off the ability for naturalized citizens and green card holders to sponsor relatives"—that would go nowhere in the Senate. And of course, there's also a House leadership group working on their version, but "the massive gap between conservative and moderate House Republicans is one reason why Speaker Paul Ryan’s DACA working group has hit its own wall in recent weeks."
The only way out of this mess might very well be House and Senate Democrats willing to shut the government down on January 20, when the last funding bill will expire. There might be no other way to force Republicans to actually unify and negotiate for real.