Immigration overhaul on life support in the House

House GOP leaders will push ahead with a vote Wednesday on their compromise immigration bill, making one last effort to pass the measure even as key lawmakers express pessimism they have any shot of success.

Lead negotiators took the weekend to make changes to the bill in an effort to secure 218 Republican votes. But even the revised measure is expected to fall short.

{mosads}“I would think [it would] fail right now,” House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), one of the chief negotiators on the compromise bill, told Fox News on Monday.

The GOP does now appear to have a Plan B, however.

Meadows predicted a slimmed-down measure dealing just with the issue of preventing immigrant families from being separated at the U.S.-Mexico border is likely to be voted on this week if the broader bill goes down.

“I would think that if it doesn’t pass … you’ll see a follow-up piece of legislation within days,” he said.

Members of GOP leadership conceded that they will likely need to pass a smaller bill to address family separations before they leave for the Fourth of July recess — even with an executive order from President Trump ending the practice. Many congressional offices have received a barrage of phone calls and messages from constituents deeply concerned about the issue.

“Why would we go back without trying to fix it?” Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), chairman of the House Rules Committee, told The Hill.

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) promised votes on two immigration bills this month as part of a deal to stop an effort by moderates to use a discharge petition to force a freewheeling immigration debate on the House floor. That agreement included a vote on the compromise bill, as well as a more hard-line measure from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) that the House rejected last week in a 193-231 vote.

But the compromise legislation — the product of weeks of negotiations between GOP conservatives and moderates — has struggled to attract enough support from Republicans.

Trump complicated House GOP efforts last week when he tweeted that Republicans should stop “wasting their time” on the effort, saying the bill stands no chance of passing the Senate. The tweet capped off a week of confusion surrounding Trump’s position on the compromise measure, which he personally rallied Republicans to support, at one point telling them he was behind them “1,000 percent.”

Lead negotiators worked furiously over the weekend to retool the measure, holding several hourlong conference calls in hopes of making tweaks to the bill to win over more support.

Negotiators are still working to attach language that would add an agricultural guest worker program and mandate that employers use an electronic-verification system to ensure workers are legal — major priorities of moderates and conservatives, respectively.

Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) said he stayed in Washington through the weekend to work on changes to the measure. But if it fails on the floor, Valadao said he’s prepared to back a standalone measure dealing only with family separations.

“If it’s a reasonable proposal, yeah, absolutely,” Valadao told The Hill. “At the end of the day, we’ve got to find a way to make sure we keep families together as much as we possibly can, as quickly as we possibly can.”

The compromise bill would provide a pathway to citizenship for so-called Dreamers; earmark $25 billion for Trump’s border wall and other security measures; end the diversity visa lottery program; and limit family-based migration.

It also would prevent children from being separated from their parents at the border, an issue that has exploded in recent weeks due to the Trump administration’s controversial “zero tolerance” immigration policy.

But a handful of immigration hard-liners say there is no way they’d support the compromise bill as long as it provides citizenship for Dreamers, which many groups on the right have decried as “amnesty.”

And while conservatives have pushed to include E-Verify, they say the biggest legislative obstacle is a provision in the compromise bill that would allow Dreamers to apply for green cards for their parents once they become citizens.

“That’s in the current bill, and that’s the biggest hang-up,” Meadows said.

Some Republicans are anxious to move on from the compromise immigration effort and address the crisis at the border.

Trump sought to defuse the political crisis last week by signing an executive order to end family separations, but it’s largely seen as a temporary fix since a decades-old court ruling says children can’t be detained for more than 20 days.

Lawmakers and the White House say legislation is needed to permanently resolve the issue. That’s why House GOP leaders are working on a back-up plan to prevent family separations at the border.

Several Senate Republicans are also working on stand-alone bills.

Meadows said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), who chairs the GOP conference and is facing a tough reelection race, is one of the leading lawmakers who is helping craft a solution. But a bill likely won’t be introduced until after the House finishes consideration of the immigration measure.

“We’re looking at that,” said Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), vice chairman of the Republican conference, referring to a stand-alone fix. He acknowledged that family-separation legislation could get a vote before the end of the week if the compromise bill fails.

Other members of Ryan’s leadership team said a narrow bill could pass regardless of what happens to the compromise measure.

“Something like that could see a vote whether or not the second bill passes,” said Rep. Luke Messer (R-Ind.), chairman of the Republican Policy Committee.

Scott Wong contributed.