Members of Congress have hope for a ‘Dreamers’ deal as shutdown nears

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WASHINGTON — Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle held out hope Tuesday for legislation to provide permanent legal status for nearly 700,000 young immigrants known as “Dreamers” despite a near meltdown in negotiations with the White House and the prospect of a government shutdown over the issue at midnight Friday.

“To the 700,000 young people, we’re not going to leave you behind,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who has bucked his party on immigration issues. “I don’t know how this movie ends, but you’re going to be taken care of.”

Two moderate House Republicans, Jeff Denham of Turlock (Stanislaus County) and David Valadao of Hanford (Kings County), on Tuesday announced long-awaited bipartisan legislation to provide legal status for an estimated 1.7 million young immigrants living in the country without documentation.

That number takes in the young immigrants who arrived into the U.S. as children without documentation but registered under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program known as DACA created under former President Barack Obama, and other young immigrants without documentation who didn’t register for the program.

The bill also calls for a “smart wall” between the U.S. and Mexico that could include some physical barriers as well as technology and orders the administration to submit a detailed mile-by-mile assessment of the southern border to determine what would work best.

“We’ve got to create some certainty for these young people,” said Denham, who, like Valadao, has a large Latino population in his district.

But prospects for a solution to immigration as part of any spending bill seemed dim.

The federal government will shut down at midnight Friday unless Congress can come up with a short-term spending bill. To pass a bill, Senate Republicans, with a 51-49 majority, will need at least nine Democratic votes. Congressional Democrats are under pressure to oppose any bill that lacks a DACA fix. But 10 Democrats face re-election next year in states Trump won and do not want to be responsible for shutting down the government over an immigration issue that many conservatives call an amnesty.

Efforts to prevent a government shutdown through bipartisan negotiations on immigration were poisoned last week by an angry, profanity-riddled and racially explosive Oval Office exchange from President Trump on Thursday. On Tuesday, Graham blamed Trump and his administration.

“We cannot do this with people in charge at the White House who have an irrational view of how to fix immigration,” Graham said.

DACA was created by the previous administration in 2012 after Congress failed to act to protect immigrants who arrived in the country as children without authorization. In exchange for making themselves known to the federal government, those immigrants obtained temporary legal status to work, go to school and otherwise carry on with their lives. A third of DACA recipients reside in California,

Trump canceled the program in September and gave Congress until March 5 to devise a permanent resolution. Last week, a federal judge in San Francisco imposed a nationwide injunction to keep the program running, but both sides fear an adverse ruling by a higher court and agree that legislation is necessary to resolve the issue. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice said it would ask the Supreme Court later this week to review the ruling.

Members of both parties contend that providing certainty for young immigrants is urgent because more than 15,000 have already lost their legal status since Trump’s order. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., pushed back Tuesday, noting that Congress has at least until March 5 “at a minimum and possibly even longer” to devise a DACA fix, depending on how things play out in court.

Meanwhile, the administration released a report by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security on Tuesday in an attempt to bolster GOP demands to limit visas for extended family members, which Republicans call chain migration, and cancellation of the visa lottery program, which admits 50,000 people a year from countries that do not have large immigration flows to the United States and is used heavily by Africans.

The report says that 3 of 4 persons convicted of “international terrorism-related charges” between the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Dec. 31 of last year were foreign-born migrants who entered the country legally.

“A significant number of terrorists have entered the country solely on the basis of family ties” as well as through the visa lottery system, the report said.

Democrats, including California Sen. Kamala Harris, and other critics quickly shot down the report for neglecting domestic terrorism perpetrated by white supremacists. Outside critics accused the administration of cherry-picking numbers.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, where Department of Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen testified, Harris and fellow California Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, cited individuals in California who had been arrested or deported since the administration canceled the DACA program.

Harris noted the case of UC Berkeley student Luis Mora, who she said is missing classes because of his detention by federal immigration authorities. Harris said noncriminal immigration arrests have tripled under the administration.

Mora “came to this country as a child, he is a political science major, he volunteers at his church,” Harris said, accusing Nielsen of backing off of her promise to prioritize criminals in enforcing immigration law.

Feinstein cited Oakland-area residents Maria and Eusebio Sanchez, who were deported last year after living and working in the United States for 23 years.

“They weren’t criminals,” Feinstein said. “They owned a home. They paid their taxes.”

Carolyn Lochhead is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: clochhead@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carolynlochhead

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