A Republican in the Senate yesterday proposed a way to break the Congress deadlock over the executive action taken by President Obama on immigration reform. The suggestion is to block only the president’s most recent executive order and no longer attempt to roll back his 2012 deferred action scheme.
Maine senator Susan Collins proposed the amendment, marking the first schism in the party’s solidarity with regard to the bill passed by the House of Representatives last week. This bill was designed to cut off funding for the president’s orders from both last year and 2012 to protect millions of undocumented immigrants from the threat of deportation. The passage of a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security past the end of this month has been delayed due to the House attaching it to legislation that would roll back Obama’s immigration reform, which has now been blocked by the Senate.
Collins has now spoken out against the bill, claiming that it is particularly unfair on undocumented immigrants who came to the United States when they were children. “I just think it’s not right to send them back to their home countries when many of them have known no other home than America, and they didn’t make the decision to come here, their parents brought them here,” Collins explained.
Republicans are hoping for another vote on the bill in the Senate next week, which seems equally unlikely to pass given the opposition from Senate Democrats.