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Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois has become the fifth member of the chamber to say he will not vote for the end-of-year spending bill unless Congress immediately addresses legislation protecting the hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrant youth who are now at risk of deportation following Donald Trump ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program this past September—and he’s encouraging other Democrats to join him:
“That’s my position. There’s too much at stake here. We can’t let this to slip into January, February with a March 5 deadline. It should be done, it can be done, easily, simply and quickly,” Durbin said in an interview.
Durbin has repeatedly said in recent months that Congress needs to resolve the status of dreamers by the end of the year, but he is now the highest-ranking Democratic senator to raise the specter of a government shutdown sparked by an impasse over immigration.
In Durbin’s home state, more than 1,000 DACA recipients missed the government’s arbitrary Oct. 5 renewal deadline, meaning young people in Illinois have already lost their work permits and protection from deportation. Nationally, 10,000 DACA recipients have already fallen out of status, and without a clean DREAM Act, 1,400 DACA recipients will become at risk of being torn from their families and homes every single day.
Sen. Kamala Harris was the first Senate Democrat to say she would oppose the spending bill if there’s no DACA fix, followed by Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders (an independent who caucuses with Democrats) and dozens of House Democrats. And as America’s Voice noted, “voting for immigration enforcement included in the omnibus spending bill without relief for Dreamers will end up being a vote to fund the deportation of Dreamers.”
“As a group,” Congressmen Luis Gutiérrez of Illinois, Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, Adriano Espaillat of New York, and dozens of other members said in an op-ed, “we are actively whipping among our colleagues to create a critical mass of Democratic votes that will not support a funding package that fails to include a clean DREAM Act. We are confident that Democrats from our Leadership to the rank-and-file—and even some Republicans—will stand with us when we get to December.”
That’s a critical fact here: Republicans may be able to pass a stopgap measure on their own, but because of their fringe members (hey there, Steve King and Louie Gohmert), they’ll still need Democratic votes in the end, and that’s the leverage Democrats hope to use in order to protect 800,000 undocumented immigrant youth currently living in fear. From the Washington Post:
Republicans are hoping to reach an agreement on a stopgap bill that extends government funding into 2018 to buy more time for negotiations, but they have conceded they will probably need Democratic votes to help pass any spending bill because of potential opposition from conservatives in the House and because Senate Democrats can filibuster spending legislation.
Durbin has been a longtime comprehensive immigration reform champion, and coauthored the 2017 DREAM Act with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. And while Durbin’s not the first member of the Senate to draw a line in the sand when it comes to undocumented immigrant youth, as the second ranking Democrat in the Senate, he’s certainly the most high-profile yet to understand the urgency to protect DACA youth right now. “I’ll put my cards on the table,” Durbin told the Washington Post. “This is an easy problem to solve.”