As he prepared to visit Capitol Hill, President Trump continued to insist Tuesday that Congress produce comprehensive immigration legislation, while anxious Republicans explored a narrower fix to the administration's policy of separating migrant children from their parents.
Speaking to a business group in Washington, Trump decried "the illegal immigration crisis on our Southern border," adding: "All we need is good legislation, and we can have it taken care of. We have to get the Democrats to go ahead and work with us."
The message came as Trump was scheduled to visit Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill on Tuesday evening to lobby them on immigration legislation that would provide billions of dollars for his long-sought border wall and other security priorities. With his administration unwilling to unilaterally reverse its separation policy, that legislation could represent the best opportunity to bring an end to the turmoil.
Amid a public outcry, Republicans are also planning to defy the White House by crafting legislation to ease the effects of the administration policy of dividing families. Republicans and Democrats have criticized the practice as inhumane and un-American.
The Department of Homeland Security has said 2,342 children have been separated from their parents since last month.
['Gut-wrenching' recording captures sounds of crying children separated from parents at the border]
In a clear sign of Republicans rejecting the administration claims and breaking with the president, several GOP lawmakers called for a halt to the policy while Congress pursues a solution.
"The administration should end that new policy immediately while Congress works with the president on a bipartisan immigration solution that secures the border, provides a status for those already here and prevents a humanitarian crisis at the border," said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.)
Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.), the second-ranking Republican senator, said his emerging bill would "require the families to be kept together in a humane setting and put them at the head of the line with regard to presenting any claim they have for an immigration benefit to an immigration judge in a matter of days or weeks at the most."
He said he hoped the Senate could vote in a matter of days.
The legislation would mark one of the rare times in Trump's presidency that Republicans have challenged him, and comes five months before midterm elections where GOP control of Congress is at stake.
In the House, a prominent conservative leader is planning to introduce a bill if more sweeping legislation fails.
"It takes out some of the more controversial issues like 'sanctuary cities,' the wall, DACA, and it keeps it very narrow," Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, said in a morning Fox News Channel interview.
Trump on Tuesday repeated his false claim that Democrats were responsible for the separation of parents from children consistent with the "zero-tolerance" policy that Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced with fanfare earlier this year.
"Democrats are the problem," he tweeted. "They don't care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can't win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!"
A few hours later, speaking to a gathering hosted by the National Federation of Independent Businesses, Trump said that as a result of "Democrat-supported loopholes in our federal laws, most illegal immigrant families and minors from Central America who arrive unlawfully at the border cannot be detained together or removed together, only released. These are crippling loopholes that cause family separation, which we don't want."
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) fired back during a speech on the Senate floor, saying Trump was "ignoring reality" with his claims that Democrats were responsible for family separations and that a change in law is needed.
"As commentator after commentator — Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative — has said: President Trump is simply not telling the truth and in a cowardly way," Schumer said. "No law — no law — requires the separation of families at the border. That's just not true."
While Republicans scrambled to craft legislation, it was not clear whether Democrats would support the measure. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has presented her own plan that would halt family separations. All 49 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus support it. No Republicans have signed on yet.
Elsewhere in the Senate, Republicans were seeking to ramp up pressure to address family separations. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) plans to send a letter to the Justice Department calling for a pause on separations until Congress can pass a legislative fix, his office said.
Trump's upcoming remarks to the House Republican Conference come days before lawmakers will vote on a pair of Republican bills meant to address the uncertain legal status of "dreamers" — young undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children — after Trump moved last year to cancel the Obama administration program that protected them from deportation.
But the immigration debate has now become consumed by the consequences of the Trump administration's border policy.
Top GOP leaders have spoken out against the separations, including the head of the party's national House campaign organization. Polls released Monday by CNN and Quinnipiac University showed that Americans oppose the policy by a roughly 2-to-1 margin.
Meanwhile, a second Republican governor — Larry Hogan of Maryland — announced Tuesday that he would not deploy any National Guard resources to the border until the Trump administration stops separating migrant children from their parents as part of their criminal prosecution efforts.
"Immigration enforcement efforts should focus on criminals, not separating innocent children from their families," Hogan said in a tweet.
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R) acted similarly Monday, saying he was scrapping plans to send National Guard assets to the border because of the separation policy.
A defiant White House continues to defend the policy on a wide variety of sometimes contradictory rationales. Trump has persistently and falsely blamed the policy on Democrats while warning of an existential threat from illegal immigrants.
"If you don't have Borders, you don't have a Country!" he tweeted Tuesday.
[The facts about Trump's policy of separating families at the border]
But other White House officials have made a policy case for the separations. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told reporters Monday that her department is merely enforcing existing laws and blamed immigrant parents for having "put their children at risk."
"Congress and the courts created this problem, and Congress alone can fix it," she said. "Until then, we will enforce every law we have on the books to defend the sovereignty and security of the United States."
But two previous presidents operating under the same laws — a Republican and a Democrat — both generally refrained from separating families at the border. Some Trump administration officials, including White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, have openly cast the separation policy as a deterrent to future illegal immigration.
Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) used an unrelated House hearing Tuesday morning to make an impassioned plea to his Republican colleagues to convince Trump to abandon the use of "child internment camps."
"I'm talking directly to my Republican colleagues: You need to stand up to President Trump," Cummings said at the outset of a hearing about a Justice Department review of its handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server. "We need you to tell him to abandon this policy. … We need you to stand up for those children."
But other Republicans have generally accepted the premise that legislation is necessary.
"I think the law needs to be changed so that children can be kept with their parents," House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said Tuesday in a CNN interview, calling for passage of the "consensus" immigration bill he helped negotiate with other House Republicans.
The question is whether any immigration legislation can possibly pass the House this week — let alone the Senate, where Democrats have more leverage.
The two bills set for a House vote this week would both address the status of dreamers, as well as provide funding for the border wall that Trump has long demanded. The bills differ in several ways, however.
One takes a more aggressive approach to immigration enforcement — for instance, requiring employers to screen their workers for legal work status using the federal "E-Verify" database — and does not guarantee dreamers a path to permanent legal residency. The other, which has been written to garner more Republican votes, omits some of the hard-line measures and offers dreamers a path to permanent residency and eventual citizenship.
Both bills are expected to include language meant to address the family separations — in short, by allowing the Trump administration to keep families together in detention. But critics of the separation policy say the language falls well short of a solution to the crisis, arguing that draft language circulated last week would do nothing to compel the Trump administration to change its policy.
Neither bill is supported by Democrats, and it is unclear whether they have the support of enough Republicans to pass the House. Two conservative lawmakers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their deliberations said that numerous House members are wary that the GOP compromise bill omits the E-Verify requirement and that it could give the parents of dreamers an indirect path to U.S. citizenship.
Further raising doubts among conservative Republicans, the lawmakers said, is that the bill is all but dead on arrival in the Senate, where Schumer on Monday called it a "sham of a bill" that "holds Dreamers and kids who have been separated from their parents hostage in order to cut legal immigration and enact the hard right's immigration agenda."
The White House and key Republicans have not signaled that they would accept a stand-alone fix but instead want the problem addressed in broader legislation that includes border wall funding and other Trump priorities.
"We want to fix the entire system," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday. "We don't want to just tinker with it. The president is tired of watching people kick it down the road and not take responsibility and not fix the problems that we have."
While family separations were the talk of the Hill on Tuesday, some lawmakers made clear they'd rather focus on other issues.
At a news conference on a spending cuts package, Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) was bombarded by questions about separation of children from their parents at the border.
He said he instead wanted to talk about the debt crisis, which he called "the number one topic in America today."
Perdue said the news conference shouldn't be "hijacked" by the "current shiny object."
Sean Sullivan, Seung Min Kim and Erica Werner contributed to this report.
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