Paul Ryan holds all the cards on DACA following budget deal

Democrats are no longer in a position to make demands. And undocumented immigrants may be the ones who suffer as a result.

In a bipartisan budget deal passed in the wee hours of the morning Thursday, Congress managed to increase the debt ceiling, pass a two-year budget, and funnel disaster aid to states and territories hit by hurricanes, floods, and fires.

All of those issues had one thing in common: Republicans likely needed Democratic votes to get them done.

And by taking them off the table until at least 2019, some Democrats fear they can no longer push Republicans to act by giving citizenship to undocumented immigrants protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

“All the leverage is gone,” Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois told reporters Wednesday night. He opposed the budget deal because it didn’t protect Dreamers and because he didn’t trust House Speaker Paul Ryan’s vague commitment to fix DACA.

Read more: The bipartisan budget deal has haters on both sides

“We have to be realistic if this passes and there’s no guarantee of a Dream Act vote,” Democrat Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona told reporters last night before the vote on the budget deal. He also voted “no.”

But other Democrats argued that the American people didn't want to shut the government down over DACA again, as happened for three days last month. Those same Democrats also pointed out that they extracted over $130 billion in non-defense spending in a budget deal that included heavy investment in social safety net programs, a better deal from a Republican-controlled Congress than they could otherwise hope to get.

Immigrant advocates on the left, including many in Congress, fumed that this deal demonstrated that many in the Democratic Party aren’t prioritizing people of color.

“This squandered opportunity is not only another failure to deliver on their word; it’s a choice to be complicit in the detention and deportation of Dreamers,” wrote immigrant advocates United We Dream, National Immigration Law Center, and the progressive grassroots group Indivisible before the vote. “Any member of Congress who votes for a budget deal without securing protections for immigrant youth — Republicans and Democrats alike — will be voting to advance Trump’s white supremacist agenda.”

Read more: John McCain is trying to solve DACA without funding Trump's border wall

The Trump administration announced in September that it would let DACA protections expire on March 5 of this year. That expiration date is being challenged in the courts, but it could be re-instituted at any point in the coming weeks and months. If Congress doesn’t act before then, the roughly 600,000 immigrants brought to the country as children could be deported to countries they hardly know.

“Speaker Ryan and Whip [Kevin] McCarthy have repeatedly shown a basic lack of understanding for the severity of this Trump-created crisis, which demands immediate action,” the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, said in a statement.

The Senate is set to start considering immigration proposals beginning next week in an increasingly rare open-floor debate. This means senators will have the opportunity to present, argue, and ultimately vote for proposals in front of the entire chamber in an attempt to get to something that has 60 votes.

Read more: How Trump made "chain migration" an anti-immigrant buzzword

But even if the Senate finds a path forward, Ryan has not promised to bring it to the floor. Republicans in his caucus and the one in the Oval Office are demanding that any path to citizenship for Dreamers comes with funding for a border wall as well as changes to the country’s legal immigration system.

And it’s unclear what Democrats can do to force Ryan’s hand.

Asked what leverage the Democrats in Congress have, the Democratic Caucus Chairman Rep. Joe Crowley of New York told reporters last night: “Well, I think we have the moral 'suasion of the American people.”

Cover: U.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) answers questions during a press conference at the U.S. Capitol Feb. 8, 2018, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)