After three different plans to restore DACA protections failed in the Senate on Thursday, the White House tried to blame Democrats for the chamber’s inability to agree on a proposal.
“Today, the Schumer Democrats in the Senate demonstrated again that they are not serious about DACA, they are not serious about immigration reform, and they are not serious about homeland security. They filibustered a proposal with an extremely generous path to citizenship because it also contained reforms that secured our border and secured our immigration system,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement Thursday night.
Though the White House blamed Democrats for the failure of the legislation Trump favored, a bill Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sponsored that made significant cuts to legal immigration, that bill failed by a 39-60 vote and did not gain the support of all Republicans in the Senate.
Other pieces of legislation with bipartisan support came closer to passing the Senate, but the White House came out strongly against those bills. The White House actually lobbied Republican senators to oppose a bipartisan plan that did not address the visa lottery system.
The Republicans who backed the bipartisan plan that came closest to passing the Senate on Thursday tore into the Trump administration for lobbying against their bill.
“This is the President’s own plan. Unfortunately this administration has resorted to spreading a lot of misinformation about the bill, and that makes it harder,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) told reporters after the bill failed in the Senate.
Though Republicans were involved in crafting the bipartisan bills opposed by the Trump administration, the White House claimed that Democrats who voted against the hard-line immigration bill backed by Trump were “radical” and part of an “open border fringe.”
“The Administration will continue advocating for an immigration package that includes border security, ending chain migration, cancelling the visa lottery, and a reasonable DACA solution—a proposal Americans support overwhelmingly,” Sanders said in the statement. “And while radical Schumer Democrats align themselves with the open border fringe, the Trump Administration will continue advocating for the American people. The next step will be for the House to continue advancing the proposal from Chairman Goodlatte and Chairman McCaul.”
