Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

GOP’s Dean Heller joins Democrats on Senate immigration vote

Dean Heller

Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., at a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, April 2, 2014, of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Subcommittee.

WASHINGTON — Republican Sen. Dean Heller helped Democrats block a bill today that would have funded the Department of Homeland Security while rolling back President Barack Obama’s unilateral immigration actions.

Heller was the only Senate Republican to vote against advancing a $40 billion spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that executes Obama’s immigration programs. The House-passed spending bill would also defund Obama’s protections for millions of immigrants in the country illegally.

“The bill before us today only includes language that complicates the process of finding a solution,” Heller said in a statement after the vote.

With Heller’s vote, all four Nevada Republicans in Congress

have bucked their party on a debate over whether to reverse or stop Obama’s immigration actions.

Nevada’s three House Republicans, Rep. Mark Amodei, Rep. Joe Heck and Rep. Cresent Hardy, voted earlier this month not to defund Obama’s 2012 decision to let some young immigrants in the country illegally go to school and get a job.

“That’s un-American,” Heck said.

The three later voted to defund Obama’s more recent November decision to expand the program to 5 million more immigrants, saying they wanted to stop the program before it started.

Nevada’s congressional Republicans say they oppose the president acting unilaterally to tweak immigration laws and have called on Congress to act instead.

But the lawmakers stop short of rolling back changes already in place protecting immigrants known as Dreamers. They say doing so would pull the rug out from under Dreamers in Nevada. A Pew Research study found Nevada has the highest percentage of illegal immigrants in the country.

Heller supported a 2013 immigration reform bill that passed the Senate but has been stalled in the House.

“We need a legislative answer to this,” Heller said last week in response to Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt’s controversial decision to join a 26-state lawsuit challenging Obama’s immigration actions.

Heller’s no-vote aligned him with his Nevada colleague, Democratic leader Sen. Harry Reid. Reid said Tuesday that Democrats won’t let a bill that defunds Obama’s immigration actions get through the Senate.

Reid kept his word moments later. Democrats and Heller voted 51-48 not to advance the spending bill. ​The bill needed 60 votes to advance.

“I am pleased my Nevada colleague joined Democrats today,” Reid said in a statement after the vote.

Facing a Feb. 27 deadline for when the homeland security agency runs out of money, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is expected to bring some form of the spending bill to a vote again in the coming weeks.

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