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    • Elena Marquez, center, and others at a rally to call on Congress to pass immigration reform. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

      It's been a good week for proponents of immigration reform. The sweeping bill that seeks to legalize most of the country's 11 million unauthorized immigrants was passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday night, after five full days of debate and amendments that did little to significantly change the original compromise.

      So, what's next for the bill?

      It is likely to be introduced on the Senate floor as early as June 3, and lawmakers will be able to propose more changes to the legislation there. Meanwhile, a secretive bipartisan group in the House also may release a competing immigration bill, though members are divulging few details about what their proposal will look like.

      Immigrant advocates are worried the Senate reform bill may face a tougher crowd in the Republican-led House than it has so far in the Senate.

      Ben Monterroso of the Service Employees International Union said advocates worry that GOP House members, all already in election mode for 2014,"are going to play to the base."

      "I'm not sure that the extremists [in the House] are going to allow this process to go without a fight," Monterroso said.

      Overall, the bill moved slightly to the right during its trip through the Senate committee. Republicans on the 18-member Senate Judiciary Committee were able to push through a few modest amendments that beefed up some of the border security provisions of the original bill, as well as loosening restrictions on and increasing the amount of visas for the high-tech industry to hire foreign workers.

      Unions were unhappy with the high-tech visas amendment but willing to live with it. "We appreciate the work done by the Gang of Eight, as well as all those senators—both Democrats and Republicans—who engaged in good faith in the arduous job of advancing this bill," said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in a statement. "We applaud the progress by the Judiciary Committee, but we will still work to make a good bill even better."

      Meanwhile, liberal groups expressed disappointment that the bill does not yet include a provision to allow people in same-sex marriages to be able to sponsor their spouses for green cards. Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat of Vermont, withdrew the amendment this week after being warned it could disrupt the fragile bipartisan coalition that supports immigration reform.

      Though the bill remained largely unchanged in the Senate committee, three main issues have emerged as major potential sticking points that could derail the bill in the coming months:

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    • Anwar al-Awlaki, shown in Yemen in October 2008, was killed in a U.S. drone strike. (Muhammad ud-Deen/AP file)Attorney General Eric Holder informed Congress on Wednesday that the U.S. has killed four Americans in drone strikes since 2009: radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and three others who were “not specifically targeted.”

      Holder’s disclosure, first reported by the New York Times, came a day before President Barack Obama was to defend his counterterrorism strategy in an afternoon speech at National Defense University. Obama was slated to focus on drone strikes—which have sparked anger across the Muslim world and increasingly tough questions in Congress—and on his broken promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison for suspected extremists.

      Separately, the Wall Street Journal reported that Obama planned to lift a ban on sending prisoners from Guantanamo to Yemen. The administration prohibited transfers to Yemen out of concern that, once there, they might carry out attacks or radicalize other Yemenis.

      The administration will also resume transferring detainees to their home countries that the Pentagon has cleared for release, the paper reported.

      Eighty-six of the 166 Guantanamo detainees have been cleared. Of those, 56 are from Yemen. But the first transfers will likely be of prisoners not from Yemen, the Journal reported, citing U.S. officials.

      There is little appetite in Congress for closing the brig. Republicans and some Democrats have opposed doing so. And lawmakers of both parties were sure to scrutinize the attorney general's letter on drones.

      "The President has directed me to disclose certain information that until now has been properly classified," Holder said in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., that was made public by the administration.

      "Since 2009, the United States, in the conduct of U.S. counterterrorism operations against al-Qa'ida and its associated forces outside of areas of active hostilities, has specifically targeted and killed one U.S. citizen," Awlaki, Holder wrote.

      "The United States is further aware of three other U.S. citizens who have been killed in such U.S. counterterrorism operations over that same time period," he wrote. "These individuals were not specifically targeted by the United States."

      Awlaki was killed in a drone strike in Yemen on Sept. 30, 2011. His 16-year-old-son, Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed in another strike two weeks later. Obama was "surprised and upset and demanded an explanation" for the second attack, according to a new book about the president's counterterrorism strategy.

      Two other Americans, Samir Khan and Jude Kenan Mohammed, were also killed in drone attacks, Holder wrote.

      The letter also went to the heads of the armed services, intelligence, foreign relations, and judiciary committees of the Senate and House of Representatives, as well as the

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    • Think of it as a sort of reverse birthday gift.

      After a tense few days in the White House Brady Press Briefing Room as the Internal Revenue Service scandal, Benghazi emails and the Justice Department's secret seizure of journalists' phone records put White House press secretary Jay Carney on defense, he decided to strike a much lighter note and offer effusive praise for the 50 or so journalists gathered for the daily briefing on Wednesday (which happened to be Carney's birthday).

      Carney defended his handling of the recent scandals, in part by suggesting that the journalists covering the White House are just too good at their jobs.

      From Carney:

      We have a team here that works really hard trying to anticipate the questions you're going to ask. The problem is, there's a lot of you and you're good at your jobs and you're smart. And we almost invariably do not anticipate every question that you ask. So sometimes we don’t have the answers, and sometimes we need to go back and get them.

      The

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