A group of House conservatives are set to introduce their own proposal on immigration this week – a move that could seek to pull ongoing bipartisan negotiations to the right.
Reps. Bob Goodlatte and Raul Labrador said the bill was expected Wednesday – with Goodlatte telling President Donald Trump about the effort in a White House meeting with bipartisan lawmakers Tuesday and Labrador speaking with reporters earlier in the day.
The meeting with Trump was largely focused on resolving the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, which Trump has opted to end but says he wants preserved legislatively in exchange for border security and immigration reforms.
According to a source familiar with the effort, the bill was discussed in Republican conference on Tuesday and will include virtually the entire wish-list of conservatives.
The bill comes from a handful of conservative Republican members from Speaker Paul Ryan’s immigration working group – though not some key moderate members of that group. The team had a meeting at the White House the Tuesday before Christmas, which included Reps. Mike McCaul, the House Homeland Security Committee chairman; Goodlatte, the House Judiciary Committee chairman; Labrador, the chairman of the immigration subcommittee on Judiciary; Martha McSally, the chairwoman of the border subcommittee on Homeland; and Mark Meadows, the conservative House Freedom Caucus chairman.
The bill is expected, according to the source familiar, to include virtually everything on the White House list of immigration priorities – which was rejected as being overly broad and containing a large number of items that would be anathema to even the most conservative Democrats and some Republicans when it was released.
The bill includes heavy border security, mandatory verification of workers and beefed-up interior immigration enforcement. The e-verify worker verification piece is one of the most controversial tenets of immigration reform, seen only as a fair trade for legalizing all estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US by negotiators in the center and on the left.
The group’s legislation would be even further to the right of a similar Republican-only proposal on the Senate side led by Majority Whip John Cornyn and Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, also strongly conservative members on immigration.
The bill is seen as an opening offer – even as Democrats and some moderate Republicans push for the issue to be resolved by the time government funding runs out in 10 days. The effort is partially designed to pull conversations to the right by staking a position for House conservatives to get behind.
In contrast, another member of the Ryan working group, Texas Republican Rep. Will Hurd, on Monday unveiled a proposal with a bipartisan partner, Congressional Hispanic Caucus Whip Pete Aguilar, that focused on border security and DACA alone.
While the Goodlatte et al proposal could possibly gain enough support to pass the House, although it would be far from an easy task, the bill would almost certainly die in the Senate, where nine Democrats would need to support it to send it to the President for his signature.
CNN’s Lauren Fox and Noah Gray contributed to this report.
