The House Appropriations Committee approved an amendment late Thursday night that would allow illegal aliens who receive the unconstitutional DACA executive amnesty to compete with American workers for jobs with the federal government. The amendment, offered by Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), was part of the FY18 Financial Services and General Government spending bill and was passed by a voice vote.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) allowed the voice vote to take place. Some committee members were reported to have appealed for a recorded vote by Chairman Frelinghuysen who denied them.
NumbersUSA President Roy Beck said all Members on the committee would have to shoulder responsibility for the "DACA Federal Jobs Amnesty" unless they publicly stated their opposition and were able to claim that they were among those who tried to persuade Rep. Frelinghuysen to take a roll call vote for the public record.
It was assumed that adding the amnesty to the bill was supported by Financial Services Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Tom Graves (R-Ga.) since it was his bill and he made no public statement of opposition when the committee put out a press release bragging about including the amnesty amendment. But Rep. Graves put out a statement late Friday about the amnesty amendment:
I spoke against this amendment, voted against it and urged all other committee members to vote against it. And I'm already working to get it stripped from the bill when it comes to the House Floor." -- Rep. Tom Graves
According to the federal government job bank website (USAJobs.gov), generally only U.S. citizens are qualified for federal government jobs, but the approval by the Appropriations Committee would allow an exception for DACA amnesty recipients who are both non-citizens and illegal aliens. The amendment would also allow DACA amnesty recipients to work for Members of Congress on Capitol Hill.
According to a recent USCIS report 787,580 illegal aliens have received DACA approval since the program was created in 2012. Over 100,000 DACA applications were approved in just the first three months of 2017.
Despite his campaign promise to end DACA on his first day in office, Pres. Trump has not taken any action on the DACA program. He specifically excluded DACA from his January executive order, which ordered a review of all the Obama-era immigration orders.
This approval comes as a coalition of 10 states that challenged DAPA are threatening to extend their lawsuit to include DACA if the Trump administration does not begin to phase out the program by September 5th. DHS Secretary John Kelly has said that according to their lawyers DACA would probably not survive the lawsuit.
Roy Beck, President of NumbersUSA, released this statement on the amendment early Friday afternoon:
Taxpayers will be outraged to learn that the House Appropriations Committee has voted to use their tax dollars to pay the salaries of illegal aliens who the committee decided should be able to compete with Americans for federal jobs. With the work-force participation rate for American millennials remaining abysmally low, the chance of landing a job with the government would be made still more difficult by the Republican-led committee's decision to make them compete with the some 800,000 young-adult recipients of the unconstitutional executive DACA amnesty. So much for Republican promises of making decisions that put American workers first.”
You can read the full text of the spending bill and amendment here.
