The White House hosted a meeting of Republican senators Tuesday afternoon for a briefing on a "fairly comprehensive" new immigration plan supposedly spearheaded by Jared Kushner but undoubtedly written by Stephen Miller.
Given the framework provided to reporters, it's definitely Miller: "Border security measures that would include efforts to secure ports of entry and a package of legal immigration proposals that would create a more ‘merit-based’ system giving preference to those with job skills rather than relatives of immigrants already in the country." The meeting featured none of the Republicans who were in the previous "Gang of Eight" that successfully negotiated a comprehensive immigration reform bill that passed in the Senate but was blocked by Republican leadership in the House.
Instead, it featured some of the most extreme anti-immigration hard-line Republicans, including Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and for some reason both senators from Idaho. It also included no Democrats. It also doesn’t address a primary concern of Democrats—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. That’s something Trump might be “willing to do a deal on,” according to White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who briefed reporters on the meeting. Meaning Trump is going to try to extort hard-line immigration changes from Democrats using the DACA Dreamers as bait.
This is only window dressing, something Trump and Republicans can point to to say they have addressed immigration reform, even though they're not even bothering to make it palatable to the entire Republican conference in the Senate, much less to the Democratic House.