DACA Likely to Slip to January

Despite Democratic efforts to have DACA dealt with before the end of the year, Democrats are now facing prospects of Congress postponing a decision on the immigration program until January.

When asked if the issue may slip to January, Representative Raul Grijalva, who is a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said “to some extent, yes.”

“Some of us are holdouts, but if you talk about reality, yeah. I mean, if leadership is not pushing it, they’re not holding the line with members and we have a CR that includes (children’s health funding), which is really, really important, funding for community health centers, then not seeing it before the end of the year becomes more and more precarious,” he added.

However, Democrats are still trying to get a deal on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals before the year’s end. The program which President Donald Trump decided to terminate a few months ago, protected young undocumented immigrants, who had come to the U.S. while children, from being deported.

Proponents of DACA say that the administration is not presenting the issue seriously enough, pointing out that over 100 DACA recipients are losing their protected status every day as a result of being rejected or not having renewed it.

Even though bipartisan efforts are being made to reach an agreement on the program, negotiators are not optimistic it could be done by January 2018.

On Thursday afternoon, Senator Dick Durbin held a meeting of the Senate negotiators, but they all said no break-throughs had been reached.

“It’s starting to take form, but we’re still negotiating,” Durbin said, according to CNN.

Senator Thom Tillis said they were trying to find common ground, adding that they would be “reaching a point pretty soon to where we have to have a discussion about chain migration, which is very important, the President’s told us, and border security and other things. I would say when we talk about ‘we’re close to an agreement,’ we’re only talking about one half of the broader agreement, so maybe we’re a third of the way there.”