Alice Ollstein at TPM has a summary on the status of the DACA program. The opening grafs:
When the final gavel came down Thursday afternoon, marking the Senate’s failure to pass any one of four immigration bills up for debate, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) left the chamber with a spring in his step.
Asked by reporters what Congress will do now for nearly 700,000 young immigrants at risk of losing their work permits and legal protections after March 5, the anti-immigration hardliner grinned and replied: “We move on to confirming judges and banking reform.”
The bobble-throated slapdick from Arkansas (thanks, Charlie Pierce) is content to maintain the status quo on immigration so he and his colleagues can get back to stuffing the federal courts with unqualified, donor-adjacent, legal practice wash-outs and religious fanatics and setting the United States up for “Financial Meltdown II: The Hobo Adventure Retirement Plan.”
So, with heartless dicks like Cotton running the shit-show, will DACA go unaddressed, and will DREAMers start getting deported to what, for them, are foreign countries? Maybe.
As Ollstein notes, there are still “bipartisan” bills in the works in both chambers. But Trump seems convinced that taking a hard line on immigration makes him look like a Putinesque strong-man, so no legislator can discount the possibility that Trump will charge in on a metaphorical horse (shirtlessness also mercifully metaphorical) with a veto threat and series of belittling tweets, no matter how pliant and conciliatory he seemed in earlier pronouncements on the program.
Another wild card: Ollstein also notes that the Supreme Court is expected to signal today whether it will weigh in on two lower court rulings that blocked Trump’s termination of the DACA program and forced the feds to keep accepting and processing DACA renewal applications. So, the uncertainty continues, and lives are on hold for the duration.