By Seung Min Kim and Burgess Everett
1/16/15 8:18 PM EST

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul is headed to the Republican Study Committee next week to pitch his hot-off-the-presses border security bill to the core group of House conservatives.

An RSC spokeswoman confirmed that McCaul will speak at next week’s meeting, and the moves signal some sort of activity on the immigration front from congressional Republicans, aside from votes to gut President Barack Obama’s executive actions.

McCaul has said he would do a border-security bill since last month. He passed a border bill through his committee during the last Congress with unanimous support, but the legislation never made it to the floor.

“It is the toughest border security bill ever before Congress, with real penalties for the administration for not doing their job,” McCaul said Friday in a statement announcing his new bill.

His legislation calls on the Department of Homeland Security to achieve so-called “operational control” – which is when all illegal entries are stopped – of the entire southern border in five years. It also requires DHS to work with nearly 30 different metrics to measure border-security effectiveness.

It also deploys new technology along the border, calls for new fencing, and requires DHS to implement a biometric exit system at all ports of entry within five years. It also gives border patrol agents access on federal lands.

The legislation has 14 original cosponsors – all Republicans.

McCaul led a panel discussion on immigration at the two-day joint Republican retreat, where he discussed the blueprint of the bill he unveiled Friday and told lawmakers that he wanted to take his legislation through regular order, according to a readout from a GOP aide who attended the session.

Meanwhile, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) – whose panel has primary jurisdiction over immigration policy – talked about interior enforcement and reforms to the legal immigration system, while McCaul’s Senate counterpart, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, also stressed the need to reform the nation’s immigration laws while securing the border, according to the aide.

Though House Republicans did little on immigration reform once leadership rolled out its principles for an overhaul at last year’s retreat, Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas) said at this year’s retreat that there has been “another year of a broken system” and “people [are] understanding this is not getting better on its own.”

House Republicans voted this week to effectively end a 2012 Obama administrative program that has stopped the deportations of more than 600,000 young undocumented immigrants and given them work permits. Conaway, the new chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, said dealing with the so-called Dreamers is “one of the pieces that I think would be necessary to deal with at this point.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/0...ee-114348.html