Trump Casts Long Shadow Over Immigration Deal

Congress is tantalizingly near the most comprehensive immigration reform in decades – a painstakingly negotiated legislative package that couples Republicans’ national security and border concerns with the emergency aid for Ukraine and Israel that Democrats are seeking, among other things.

Republicans in the Senate, where the bipartisan negotiations are taking place and where the bill may come up for a vote as early as this week, have hailed the emerging agreement as a historic opportunity for the GOP to enact long-sought conservative policies to address migrants streaming into the U.S. from the southern border.

There’s just one problem: Donald Trump.

The former president, who now appears almost certain to be the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nominee after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race on Sunday, all but skewered the deal in recent days, implying he’d refuse to back anything other than a package of hard-line Republican policy priorities.

“I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions & Millions of people,” he said last week on social media, inserting himself into the negotiations and ensuring a contentious – if not altogether impossible – pathway through the House.

In doing so, the former president, with just one post, jeopardized the ability of dozens of already vulnerable GOP candidates to deliver a signature legislative victory on an issue many of their constituents rank as a top concern.

It’s a familiar – and increasingly problematic – occurrence for conservative policymakers up and down the ballot, whose viability, whether they like it or not, is often intimately tied to Trump’s actions and words. The dynamic is particularly unpleasant for House Republicans, many of whom would much prefer the hard-line border security bill they passed last year on a party-line vote, known as H.R. 2, but are desperate to notch a legislative win after an otherwise historically unproductive year.

Rep. Chip Roy, Texas Republican, captured the conundrum in a fiery speech delivered in November on the House floor, in which he beseeched his colleagues to pass something – anything – that he could take back home and trumpet.

“I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing – one! – that I can go campaign on and say we did. One!” Roy yelled. “Anybody sitting in the complex, you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done besides, ‘Well, I guess it’s not as bad as the Democrats.’”

Earlier this year, Rep. Andy Biggs shared the same concern in an interview with conservative media outlet Newsmax: “We have nothing. In my opinion, we have nothing to go out there and campaign on,” the Arizona Republican said. “It’s embarrassing.”

It’s worth noting that Roy, for one, has called the still-evolving immigration bill “terrible.” But it also begs the question: Just how long will the House GOP do Trump’s bidding, particularly when the party’s candidates could pay a price at the ballot box?

After his stunning White House win in 2016, Trump began to assume a grip over a Republican Party he rejoined in 2009 after being registered as a Democrat. His control over the GOP has only tightened since then, with some party officials feeling the wrath of his influence if they dare to disagree with or challenge him in any way.

But while that has suited Trump’s objectives, his leadership of the party has not always worked to the electoral benefit of down-ticket Republicans.

In 2017’s off-year elections, for example, Democrats took complete control of state government in New Jersey and Washington state, while also picking up a power-flipping 15 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates – the chamber’s biggest electoral shift toward Democrats since 1899.

In 2018, Democrats took control of the House of Representatives, picked up seven governorships and flipped control of six state legislative chambers. Republicans’ two-seat gain in the Senate was small consolation, with Trump’s agenda stymied by the House.

The following year, Democrats flipped the governorship in Kentucky and kept control of the office in Louisiana despite strong efforts by Trump to elect Republicans. Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to President Joe Biden, and Democrats took control of the Senate.

Republicans made some key gains in state elections in 2021, taking the Virginia governorship and control of that state’s House of Delegates. But they underperformed in 2022, barely taking control of the House despite historical trends that suggested big gains for the party not in power in the White House.

“When we look at Trump’s style of politics and choice of endorsements in past elections, that’s clearly not hurting him in the Republican Party,” says Christopher Devine, a political science professor at the University of Dayton.

Down-ticket candidates, however, might bear the brunt of the consequences for the party’s allegiance, he says.

While Trump is popular among Republicans, “the question is whether it’s turning off voters outside the party,” such as independents, Devine says. “In 2022, he seemed to hurt down-ticket Republicans. Whether that will still be the case in 2024 with Trump on the ballot – I don’t know.”

Most notably in the 2022 midterms, high-profile Trump-backed GOP candidates for Senate – Arizona’s Kari Lake, Pennsylvania’s Mehmet Oz and Georgia’s Herschel Walker – lost their elections in the midterms, along with a good number of other Republicans who parroted Trump’s false statements that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Democrats had another good off-year election in 2023, taking back the Virginia House of Delegates, picking up seats in New Jersey and winning a critical Wisconsin Supreme Court seat that has massive implications for abortion rights and voting access.

They dominated in special elections in the past year, too, last week flipping a state legislative seat in Trump’s home state of Florida from red to blue.

Such results point to a shadow the GOP is eager to shed even as plenty of members remain flummoxed over how to disentangle their interests with Trump’s grip over the party – a crippling dynamic that former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, now the only other major GOP contestant in the presidential primary, is trying to highlight for voters.

“The reality is, who lost the House for us? Who lost the Senate? Who lost the White House? Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump,” she said while campaigning in New Hampshire last week.

The looming immigration deal is poised to be the next litmus test.

Senate Republican leaders have been emphasizing to their House GOP colleagues that the deal is the best they can hope to get even if Trump is president next year and Republicans control both congressional chambers, given the need for any bill to pass a 60-vote threshold in the Senate.

“One of the things that I keep reminding my members is if we had a 100% Republican government – president, House, Senate – we probably would not be able to get a single Democratic vote to pass what Sen. Lankford and the administration are trying to get together,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky told reporters, referring to the ongoing negotiations led for Republicans by Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma.

“This is a unique opportunity to accomplish something in divided government,” McConnell said.

Even GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has taken pains to support Trump, has called for House Republicans to back the border deal.

“To those who think that if President Trump wins, which I hope he does, that we can get a better deal – you won’t,” Graham recently told reporters. “You got to get 60 votes in the United States Senate.”

“To my Republican friends: To get this kind of border security without granting a pathway to citizenship is really unheard of. So if you think you’re going to get a better deal next time, in ’25, if President Trump’s president, Democrats will be expecting a pathway to citizenship for that,” he said. “So to my Republican colleagues, this is a historic moment to reform the border.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson, who is already in a tough position with Republican hard-liners after negotiating with Democrats on a top-line budget figure and stop-gap funding package to avert a government shutdown, seems keen on heeding Trump’s marching orders – though he left open the possibility last week of at least examining the Senate deal.

“We don’t know exactly what the Senate has come up with because we’ve not seen the text,” he said at a news conference. “We’re anxious to see the text of what they’ve done.”