Congress will vote next week on an omnibus spending bill, and it seems that Democrats will not use it as an opportunity to fight for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
From The Hill:
Democratic leaders have kept the rhetorical heat on Republicans to stage a DACA vote, using every opportunity to press Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to bring the issue to the floor. But after Senate Democrats were blamed for a brief government shutdown over DACA in January — and with Republicans likely needing scores of Democratic votes to pass the omnibus — House leaders are not insisting that such a commitment accompany the 2018 spending package.
Instead, Democratic leaders want appropriators in both parties to drop all contentious “riders” for the sake of easing passage of the omnibus and preventing a government shutdown ahead of March 23, when funding expires.
A recent court decision has forced the Trump administration to continue processing DACA renewals, making its previous, arbitrarily imposed, March 5 deadline for ending the program meaningless. This prolonging of uncertainty for DACA recipients seems to have made it a lower priority for some politicians.
In early February, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi gave a record-setting eight hour speech on DACA, protesting an instance when the issue was pushed to the side in a different budget deal, but she now believes passing this omnibus bill is the priority.
“There’s not a whole lot of reason to negotiate—to do anything that is not already covered by the court decision,” Pelosi said Thursday, as reported by The Hill. “It is necessary for us to pass [the omnibus] to defend our country, to invest in our children’s future, to keep America number one in every respect, to do so in a way that creates jobs.”
As Congress continues to punt on the issue, ICE is back on its bullshit, announcing 115 arrests in California during a three-day period just last week.