The White House Is Asking Senators to Withdraw Their Sponsorship of Bipartisan Immigration Bill

The bill is the only one that appears to have any chance of passing, but a White House official calls it “outrageous” and “spectacularly poorly drafted.”

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The Trump administration is asking senators to withdraw their sponsorship of a bipartisan immigration bill, a White House official told reporters on Thursday.

The official, who asked not to be named, said the bill is “so spectacularly poorly drafted” that the White House is “officially asking the sponsors of the bill to withdraw their sponsorship, allowing for the possibility that they were simply grievously misinformed about the bill’s outrageous contents.” The comments came an hour after the White House released a statement threatening to veto the bill. 

As Mother Jones has written, the bipartisan measure would fund President Donald Trump’s border wall in exchange for providing a path to citizenship for Dreamers—undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. It was introduced by Sens. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) and Angus King (I-Maine), along with seven additional Republicans and seven Democrats. It faces tough odds of getting the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster, but is the only bill that currently appears to have a chance of passing. The administration favors a hardline approach that would severely curtail legal immigration.

A different administration official told reporters on Thursday, “We believe it is likely and possible, in the near future, you will see human smugglers throughout Central America circulating the Schumer-Rounds-Collins press release to drum up business.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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