Promises But No Consensus Plan From Republicans To Stop Family Separations

By Cameron Joseph and Alice Ollstein | June 19, 2018 4:07 pm

Only he can fix it.

President Trump dropped a mess into Congress’s lap with his new policy separating families at the border. While Republicans are promising a quick fix to the policy — which many concede was cruelly conceived and poorly executed — they emerged from early talks on Tuesday with no clear path forward to resolving his latest manufactured crisis.

Senate Republicans promised to move on legislation as early as this week. But they’re deeply divided on whether Trump should temporarily halt the family separations until they can work out a long-term legislative fix. They aren’t yet rallying around a single bill to address the situation. And the president poured cold water on the one Senate GOP proposal that had any momentum.

“We haven’t had a very good track record in resolving immigration issues. We’ll see,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) told TPM when asked if he thought the Senate would actually be able to strike a deal to end the inhumane treatment of migrant children.

Corker, who is retiring, was blunter than most Republicans that this was a problem created entirely by the Trump administration — and that Senate Republicans are not close on a deal their caucus could all agree to, let alone one that could pass the Senate, the House, and get signed by the unpredictable president.

Trump’s Tuesday evening visit to Capitol Hill to meet with House Republicans on different immigration legislation that’s set to get a vote later this week could complicate matters even further.

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