House rejects immigration overhaul despite Trump's late plea

WASHINGTON — The House resoundingly rejected a far-reaching immigration overhaul Wednesday, despite a last-minute plea from President Donald Trump, as internal divisions in the Republican ranks continued to hobble legislative efforts to protect young immigrants in the country illegally.

The 121-301 vote was an embarrassment to both Trump and House Republican leaders who had spent weeks trying to bring together Republican hard-liners and immigration moderates — and ended up alienating many in both camps. In the end, nearly as many Republicans voted against the bill, 112, as for it, 121.

The defeat provided the latest display of the Republican Party's disunity in Congress on immigration. And it highlighted the continuing inability of both the House and Senate to resolve the fate of young immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children. Many of those immigrants have been shielded from deportation under an Obama-era program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, but Trump moved last year to end the program.

Republicans in the House are now likely to turn their focus to narrower legislation that would seek to keep migrant families together at the border, an issue that senators are also looking to address. But with the Fourth of July approaching and lawmakers close to returning home for a recess, it was not clear how quickly a narrower measure might move forward.

The frustrations over immigration in Congress are matched by the confusion in the Trump administration. A federal judge in California issued a nationwide injunction late Tuesday temporarily stopping the Trump administration from separating children from their parents at the border and ordering that all families already separated be reunited within 30 days.

The Justice Department replied with an appeal to Congress.

"Last night's court decision makes it even more imperative that Congress finally act to give federal law enforcement the ability to simultaneously enforce the law and keep families together," the department said in a statement Wednesday morning.

"Without this action by Congress, lawlessness at the border will continue, which will only lead to predictable results: more heroin and fentanyl pushed by Mexican cartels plaguing our communities, a surge in MS-13 gang members, and an increase in the number of human trafficking prosecutions," the Justice Department statement said.

But the House vote demonstrated the difficulty of developing any kind of broad immigration legislation that can clear even a single house of Congress. Earlier this year, the Senate rejected a series of immigration measures and last week the House rejected a hard-line immigration bill favored by conservatives in that chamber.

For their part, Democrats have offered their support for legislation to protect young immigrants from deportation while beefing up border security. But they have been unwilling to support broader legislation that fulfills Trump's wider demands on immigration, including making cuts to legal immigration.

Hours before Wednesday's vote, Trump took to Twitter and implored the House — in all capital letters — to pass the bill, which would have provided more than $23 billion for border security, including for his promised wall, while keeping migrant families together at the border and providing a path to citizenship for the young immigrants.

But coming just days after Trump had told Congress to forget about immigration until after the midterm elections, his last-minute change of mind did not prove persuasive. On the eve of the vote, the bill appeared all but certain to be heading toward defeat, in part because of the mixed messages from the president.

"There's still a divide, and you could see it in the vote last week, and this week there's probably a little bit more of a divide," Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the majority whip, conceded on "Fox & Friends" on Wednesday morning.

The bill considered Wednesday would have made significant changes to the immigration system and generally adhered to the president's stated requirements for any overhaul. It would have limited family-based immigration and it would have eliminated the diversity visa lottery, which admits immigrants from countries that do not send many people to the United States.

But despite the painstaking negotiations among Republicans to try to arrive at a broad immigration overhaul that would be acceptable to different ideological factions within their conference, the resulting compromise still ran into trouble with conservatives. It has been derided on the right as "amnesty" for offering a pathway to citizenship for the young immigrants.

The vote Wednesday followed a push by moderate Republicans, many facing difficult re-election bids, to compel the House to take action to protect those young immigrants. They attempted to use a parliamentary maneuver known as a discharge petition to force a series of votes on immigration, but fell two signatures short of what they needed.

For now, the DACA program has been kept alive by the courts, but the failure of Congress to agree on a legislative fix means that hundreds of thousands of young immigrants in the country illegally will continue to face an uncertain future.

House Republican leaders twice delayed a vote on the immigration overhaul last week to give themselves more time to build support. But by Tuesday, their last-ditch efforts had failed to produce any new outpouring of enthusiasm.

Trump did not help matters.

Last Friday, he wrote on Twitter that Republicans in Congress "should stop wasting their time" on immigration legislation until after the midterm elections in November — a message directly at odds with the effort in the House to build support for the compromise bill.

The president could have been a critical salesman in persuading wavering Republicans to get behind the legislation. Instead, his conflicting messages only added to the discombobulation that Republicans have not been able to escape on the politically delicate subject of immigration.