Members of Congress have hope for a ‘Dreamers’ deal as shutdown nears

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WASHINGTON — Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle held out hope Tuesday for legislation to provide permanent legal status for nearly 700,000 young immigrants known as “Dreamers” despite a near meltdown in negotiations with the White House and the prospect of a government shutdown over the issue at midnight Friday.

“To the 700,000 young people, we’re not going to leave you behind,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who has bucked his party on immigration issues. “I don’t know how this movie ends, but you’re going to be taken care of.”

Two moderate House Republicans, Jeff Denham of Turlock (Stanislaus County) and David Valadao of Hanford (Kings County), on Tuesday announced long-awaited bipartisan legislation to provide legal status for an estimated 1.7 million young immigrants living in the country without documentation.

That number takes in the young immigrants who arrived into the U.S. as children without documentation but registered under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program known as DACA created under former President Barack Obama, and other young immigrants without documentation who didn’t register for the program.

The bill also calls for a “smart wall” between the U.S. and Mexico that could include some physical barriers as well as technology and orders the administration to submit a detailed mile-by-mile assessment of the southern border to determine what would work best.

“We’ve got to create some certainty for these young people,” said Denham, who, like Valadao, has a large Latino population in his district.

But prospects for a solution to immigration as part of any spending bill seemed dim.

The federal government will shut down at midnight Friday unless Congress can come up with a short-term spending bill. To pass a bill, Senate Republicans, with a 51-49 majority, will need at least nine Democratic votes. Congressional Democrats are under pressure to oppose any bill that lacks a DACA fix. But 10 Democrats face re-election next year in states Trump won and do not want to be responsible for shutting down the government over an immigration issue that many conservatives call an amnesty.

Efforts to prevent a government shutdown through bipartisan negotiations on immigration were poisoned last week by an angry, profanity-riddled and racially explosive Oval Office exchange from President Trump on Thursday. On Tuesday, Graham blamed Trump and his administration.

“We cannot do this with people in charge at the White House who have an irrational view of how to fix immigration,” Graham said.

DACA was created by the previous administration in 2012 after Congress failed to act to protect immigrants who arrived in the country as children without authorization. In exchange for making themselves known to the federal government, those immigrants obtained temporary legal status to work, go to school and otherwise carry on with their lives. A third of DACA recipients reside in California,

Trump canceled the program in September and gave Congress until March 5 to devise a permanent resolution. Last week, a federal judge in San Francisco imposed a nationwide injunction to keep the program running, but both sides fear an adverse ruling by a higher court and agree that legislation is necessary to resolve the issue. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice said it would ask the Supreme Court later this week to review the ruling.

Members of both parties contend that providing certainty for young immigrants is urgent because more than 15,000 have already lost their legal status since Trump’s order. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., pushed back Tuesday, noting that Congress has at least until March 5 “at a minimum and possibly even longer” to devise a DACA fix, depending on how things play out in court.

Meanwhile, the administration released a report by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security on Tuesday in an attempt to bolster GOP demands to limit visas for extended family members, which Republicans call chain migration, and cancellation of the visa lottery program, which admits 50,000 people a year from countries that do not have large immigration flows to the United States and is used heavily by Africans.

The report says that 3 of 4 persons convicted of “international terrorism-related charges” between the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Dec. 31 of last year were foreign-born migrants who entered the country legally.

“A significant number of terrorists have entered the country solely on the basis of family ties” as well as through the visa lottery system, the report said.

Democrats, including California Sen. Kamala Harris, and other critics quickly shot down the report for neglecting domestic terrorism perpetrated by white supremacists. Outside critics accused the administration of cherry-picking numbers.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, where Department of Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen testified, Harris and fellow California Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, cited individuals in California who had been arrested or deported since the administration canceled the DACA program.

Harris noted the case of UC Berkeley student Luis Mora, who she said is missing classes because of his detention by federal immigration authorities. Harris said noncriminal immigration arrests have tripled under the administration.

Mora “came to this country as a child, he is a political science major, he volunteers at his church,” Harris said, accusing Nielsen of backing off of her promise to prioritize criminals in enforcing immigration law.

Feinstein cited Oakland-area residents Maria and Eusebio Sanchez, who were deported last year after living and working in the United States for 23 years.

“They weren’t criminals,” Feinstein said. “They owned a home. They paid their taxes.”

Carolyn Lochhead is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: clochhead@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carolynlochhead

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Ex-CIA Officer Suspected of Compromising Chinese Informants Is Arrested

He appeared in Brooklyn federal court on Tuesday and is being held there while awaiting transfer to Virginia. He does not have a lawyer, a Justice Department official said. The F.B.I. apparently learned that Mr. Lee was traveling to the United States and scrambled to charge him on Saturday.

Mr. Lee had previously traveled to the United States in 2012 to live with his family in Virginia. It was during that trip that F.B.I. agents searched his luggage during hotel stays in Hawaii and Virginia and found two small books with handwritten notes that contained classified information. He later made his way back to Hong Kong after being questioned by F.B.I. agents in 2013.

It is unclear why Mr. Lee decided to risk arrest by coming to the United States this month.

In the books the agents found, Mr. Lee had written down details about meetings between C.I.A. informants and undercover agents, as well as their real names and phone numbers, according to court papers. Prosecutors said that material in the books reflected the same information contained in classified cables that Mr. Lee had written while at the agency.

More than a dozen C.I.A. informants were killed or imprisoned by the Chinese government. The extent to which the informant network was unraveled, reported last year by The New York Times, was a devastating setback for the C.I.A.

Officials said the number of informants lost in China rivaled losses in the Soviet Union and Russia during the betrayals of both Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, formerly of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. They divulged intelligence operations to Moscow for years.

The C.I.A. declined to comment on Mr. Lee’s arrest.

According to court documents, Mr. Lee served in the United States Army from 1982 to 1986 and joined the C.I.A. in 1994 as a case officer. Former agency officials said he also served in China during his career. Those who knew him said he left the agency disgruntled after his career plateaued.

Prosecutors said that both before and after he and his family moved back to the United States in 2012, Mr. Lee met with former C.I.A. colleagues and other government employees.

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As the agency began losing assets in China, it was not clear at first that the losses were systematic, but as the disappearances mounted, the American intelligence community eventually realized it had a major problem.

The case had frustrated counterintelligence officials in the F.B.I. and C.I.A. as they sought to determine how the Chinese had disrupted agency operations in the country.

The F.B.I. suspected an insider had revealed sensitive information to the Chinese government, a theory not initially embraced by the C.I.A. Mr. Lee eventually became a prime suspect in the hunt for a traitor.

Former intelligence officials said that the F.B.I. lured Mr. Lee back to the United States as part of a ruse and he was interviewed five times in May and June 2013. The authorities said he never disclosed the two books, described as an address book and a datebook, to investigators.

Formers officials said they were surprised that Mr. Lee came back to the United States in 2012, knowing he might be under F.B.I. suspicion. Details about the F.B.I. operation to lure him back were tightly held, but former intelligence officials said he returned with the promise of a possible contract with the C.I.A. Many former agency officers leave the agency and then return on contract. At some point after the F.B.I. interviewed him, Mr. Lee returned to Hong Kong.

Why the F.B.I. did not arrest Mr. Lee after originally finding the classified material in his notebooks remains unclear. The F.B.I. declined to comment.

Officials are concerned that Mr. Lee’s case and at least one other represent a troubling pattern of Chinese intelligence targeting former agency officials, an easier task than trying to recruit current C.I.A. operatives.

In June, a former C.I.A. officer was charged with providing classified information to China and making false statements. Prosecutors said that the former officer, Kevin Patrick Mallory, 60, of Leesburg, Va., had top-secret documents and incriminating messages on a communications device he brought back from Shanghai.

In March, prosecutors announced the arrest of a longtime State Department employee, Candace Marie Claiborne, accused of lying to investigators about her contacts with Chinese officials. According to the criminal complaint against Ms. Claiborne, who pleaded not guilty, Chinese agents wired cash into her bank account and lavished her with thousands of dollars in gifts.

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