Immigration Reform 2014: House GOP Leaders Moving Bill To Axe Immigrant-Outreach Job

House Republicans are moving on immigration after all. It’s just not exactly what Democrats and immigrant advocates had in mind. On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee marked up three bills with implications for an issue on which GOP leaders in the chamber have indicated they’ve given up on trying to push a broad series of reforms this year. One would authorize the House to file a lawsuit against the president or any other official any time the chamber adopted a resolution accusing them of failing to faithfully uphold the law – a charge commonly leveled by House Republicans at Obama and top immigration officials in part because of memos which set prosecution priorities, including one which gave some Dreamers protection from deportation.

Another, the Immigration Compliance Enforcement (ICE) Act, would axe the job of one Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official: Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, currently the deputy assistant director of custody programs and community outreach, formerly the agency’s public advocate. Many immigrant advocates didn’t think that position was anything more than a sympathetic face – but no real power to represent immigrants’ interests – at an otherwise villainous agency. It didn’t last long anyway: a March 2013 federal appropriations bill eliminated it just over a year after its creation. But ICE kept Lorenzen-Strait on in the community outreach position, outraging conservatives like ICE Act sponsor Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.), who charges the agency with simply creating an identical job with a different title. The bill considered on Wednesday by the House Judiciary Committee would prevent the government from funding either of those jobs, or any other like it.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice, the nation’s largest immigrant-advocacy group, blasted House leadership for “inexplicably” taking out time on Black’s bill while refusing to bring a broader package of reforms to the House floor for a vote. “For all the talk of wanting to do immigration reform, the facts are as disturbing as they are stubborn,” said Sharry. “The only vote allowed by House leadership on immigration this Congress was on a nasty measure put forth by Rep. Steve King (R-IA) to defund the DACA program and subject DREAMers to deportation.”