WASHINGTON: The Re­­pub­lican-led House rejec­ted a far-ranging immigration bill on Wednesday despite its eleventh-hour endorsement by President Donald Trump, as the gulf between Republican’s moderate and conservative wings proved too deep for leaders to avert an election-year display of division on the issue.

The vote was 301-121, with nearly half of Republicans opposing the measure. The depth of Republican opposition was an embarrassing showing for Trump and a rebuff of House Republican leaders, who’d postponed the vote twice and proposed changes in hopes of driving up the vote for a measure that seemed doomed from the start.

The tally also seemed to empower Republican conservatives on the fraught issue. Last week a more conservative package was defeated but 193 Repub­licans voted for it.

Even if it passed, it would have been dead on arrival in the closely divided Senate, where Democrats would have had enough votes to kill it.

Republican leaders have been talking about a Plan B: a bill focused narrowly on barring the government from wresting children from migrant families caught entering the country without authorization.

With television and social media awash with images and wails of young children torn from parents, many Republicans want to pass a narrower measure addressing those separations before Congress leaves at week’s end for its July 4 break.

But Republican aides said Republicans had yet to agree on bill language. And the effort was complicated by a federal judge who ordered that divided families be reunited with 30 days.

Democrats voted en masse against the House legislation, which would provide a shot at citizenship for hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought illegally to the US as children.

Published in Dawn, June 28th, 2018