Republican lawmaker sees House immigration bill failing: Fox News

Conservative Republican Representative Mark Meadows said on Monday he expects an immigration bill to be offered in the House of Representatives on Tuesday will fail, but that it will be followed by legislation aimed at keeping immigrant families together at the Mexican border.

Asked on Fox News about the prospects of a second immigration bill passing or failing on Tuesday, Meadows told Fox News: “I would think fail right now.”

He said he had held discussions over the weekend about possible changes to the legislation.

The House on Thursday rejected a measure favored by conservatives that would have halted the practice of splitting up families and addressed a range of other immigration issues.

Meadows said that even if the compromise measure failed, he expected follow-up legislation aimed primarily at preventing children from being separated from their parents at the border.

“Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers has given some thoughtful insight in terms of how we keep those families together, some of those things that a lot of us want to do, so I think if it doesn’t pass on Tuesday night you’ll see a follow-up piece of legislation within days,” he said.

The administration of President Donald Trump has faced a global outcry over images and video of crying children and their distraught parents separated at the U.S.-Mexico border. Critics in Trump’s Republican Party, as well as his wife and daughter, urged him to abandon the policy.

The president buckled to the pressure on Wednesday, issuing an executive order that ended the separations. But the government has yet to reunite more than 2,000 children with their parents.

Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Writing by Eric Walsh; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Steve Orlofsky