WASHINGTON — Republican leaders in Congress said they want to advance legislation next year to secure the U.S.-Mexico border, but they don’t favor addressing the status of 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told reporters Tuesday that last year’s border security proposal by House Homeland Security Chairman Mike McCaul is a “good place to start” in talks with President-elect Donald Trump. The McCaul measure wouldn’t build a wall on the border as Trump insisted he would do during his campaign.
Instead, it would require the Department of Homeland Security to achieve operational control of the Southwest border in five years, while authorizing $1 billion a year over 10 years to meet various security goals.
McCarthy said changes to immigration laws will have to wait. “I don’t think anything changes on immigration until we secure the border,” he said.
In the Senate, party leaders also want better border enforcement before taking the debate any further. That’s a change from the comprehensive measure the Senate passed in 2013, which included a pathway to legal residency for undocumented immigrants.
“My conclusion is we’re not going to be able to do a big comprehensive bill,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. “We’ve tried that. It just doesn’t work. We need to secure the border and we need to enforce the law in regards to people with criminal records who are illegally in this country. And then we can have a further conversation.”
Cornyn and Sen. John Thune of South Dakota said the idea of a wall should be viewed as more theoretical than concrete.
“There’s the virtual wall, the technological wall, the real wall, the fencing — there are lots of permutations of this now being batted around,” Thune said in an interview. “And I’m not sure exactly what it looks like. But I think border security and the wall are going to be the priority in any debate about immigration.”
Trump has already backed away from the idea of a fortified wall, saying in a CBS “60 Minutes” interview days after his election that he would accept fencing in some areas. He didn’t repeat his campaign promise to deport all undocumented immigrants, saying he would focus first on those with criminal records and address the others later.
The last significant action on immigration was in 2013, when the Senate passed its plan, 68-32, including a path to legal residency and $46 billion to secure the border with Mexico. The measure would have doubled the U.S. Border Patrol’s size by adding 20,000 agents, required 700 miles of fencing at the Mexico border, and added unmanned aerial drones to help police the border.
That year, House Republicans addressed border security in a piecemeal way, without any effort to change immigration laws, and the two chambers never agreed on a plan.
