As Evangelical leaders around the U.S. urge legislators in Washington D.C. to get a deal done on immigration reform, a familiar and influential face from the Bush administration era looks like she's making her own push to get a deal done on the controversial issue.
Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State under President George W. Bush, is reaching out to high-profile Democrats and Republicans in order to put together a bipartisan panel of Democrats and Republicans that can tackle a deal on fixing the immigration system.
In creating the panel, Rice will also be relying on help from former Republican Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, ex-Pennsylvania Democrat Gov. Ed Rendell and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros, a source speaking with anonymity told Reuters.
The group, which was brought together thanks to the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington D.C., is being created with the goal of continuing the push in the last few weeks on immigration reform that has come from the White House and Congress.
In January, President Obama brought forward a plan on fixing the immigration system that involved creating a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., while a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators, led by Charles Schumer, D-NY, and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., presented a joint plan on immigration reform that would also create a pathway once the U.S.-Mexico order was secured, and called for tighter background checks from businesses on the immigration statuses of workers they hire.
"I hope it makes plain that there is bipartisan support for pro-growth solutions that would result from immigration reform," Barbour told the Huffington Post in an interview.
Meanwhile, Evangelical leaders are urging Washington to put aside their differences and come to a compromise on immigration soon. In fact, a group of pastors, many of them in the conservative South, have launched a 40-day campaign that will have churchgoers petition their Congress representatives and pray and read scripture passages featuring messages of welcoming strangers.
"We have pastors preach in pulpits to parishioners in Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas - in all the wonderful red states across America," Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, one of the country's most prominent Hispanic evangelicals, told Reuters.
Rodriguez and other spiritual leaders have been maintaining constant dialogue with legislators on the subject, asking them to help undocumented immigrants find a way to become legal residents.
However, the notion of evangelicals becoming allies with the White House on immigration reform is still far fetched, as much like with Republicans, evangelicals are split on the idea of granting undocumented immigrants living in the country U.S. citizenship.
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