Following the brief government shutdown last week, the debate over the GOP's immigration proposal is the next big thing to open on the Senate floor Monday night, where the Democrats and the Republicans are set to reach a bipartisan vote on crucial and contentious immigration policies bound to affect millions of people.
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Critics have argued that the Republican senators have proposed an enforcement-heavy immigration bill, the Secure and Succeed Act, which mirrors Trump's immigration proposal. They say these efforts are intended to cordon off immigration mechanisms and tighten border security.
“We’re going to have something in the Senate that we haven’t had in a while,” Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said Sunday during NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It’s a real debate on an issue where we really don’t know what the outcome is going to be.”
The GOP proposal was led by senators Charles E. Grassley and John Cornyn, along with Thom Tillis, David Perdue, James Lankford, Tom Cotton and Joni Ernst.
The bill talks of possibly legalizing nearly 1.8 million "Dreamers" or recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA, program, in exchange for some of the biggest enforcement changes in two decades. This includes an imminent US$25 billion to build a border wall along the southern border, which funds fencing and other technology, along with more border patrol agents.
The Secure and Succeed Act also includes limiting family-based legal migration to just the nuclear family — that is, only spouses and children under the age of 18 — and reallocating visas from the diversity lottery program to other visa programs.
Immigration activists and lawmakers are wary of the GOP immigration plan.
"Our nightmare scenario is that we get into a long-term conversation about immigration," said Angel Padilla, policy director for Indivisible, a grass-roots organization, according to the Washington Post. "There are things that need to be addressed for sure that should be addressed separately, but that will only block actual real solutions for dreamers."
Over the weekend, Trump also tweeted of "creating a safe, modern and lawful immigration system" that also includes more border security, ending diversity lottery program and family-based legal migration.