Steve Bannon, head of conservative news site Breitbart.com, and Steve Stivers, the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), agreed on Friday that a legislative fix to grant legal status to undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children “would tear apart the party and hurt Republican candidates in 2018”, according to a source familiar with the meeting.
Bannon’s meeting with the chair of the NRCC, which works to elect Republicans to the House of Representatives, was first reported by Politico.
It marks a significant split between the approaches of House Republicans and Senate Republicans towards Bannon, who was fired from the role of White House chief strategist in August but continues to be an influential figure in Republican politics.
Bannon has repeatedly called for the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, to be removed and is actively recruiting challengers to incumbent Republican senators in 2018. In response, a McConnell-allied Super Pac, the Senate Leadership Fund, has repeatedly attacked the former White House strategist with tweets implying he is an antisemite.
The former White House aide also campaigned for insurgent Roy Moore in September’s Republican Senate primary in Alabama against incumbent Luther Strange. Strange was not only actively backed by McConnell but was also endorsed by Donald Trump, Bannon’s former boss.
Bannon is also supporting a primary challenger to House incumbent Robert Pittinger of North Carolina. But Politico reported that Bannon pledged to Stivers that he would not focus on unseating House incumbents in the 2018 election, only on ousting McConnell and McConnell’s Senate allies.
The meeting comes only months before the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program is set to expire in March 2018. The program allowed certain undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as minors – known as Dreamers – to remain in the country and work or attend school legally.
The program was created by executive order by Barack Obama in 2012, and conservative critics have long considered it legally controversial as an action of the executive branch and not legislation passed by Congress.
Attempts to pass bills to give legal status to Daca recipients have been stymied in Congress, and a 2013 bill for comprehensive immigration reform never came to a vote in the House after passing the Senate with a bipartisan majority.
Trump has struck contradictory notes on the program, which many Republicans consider to be a form of amnesty. He called for Congress to pass a replacement for the program in September, but has demanded that any legislation allowing Dreamers to stay in the country legally also include funding for a border wall and cuts to legal immigration.