Trump offers more Dreamer protection for $5.7B for border wall

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Saturday offered to extend protections for some undocumented immigrants brought into the country illegally as children and immigrants with temporary protected status as part of a deal to end the partial government shutdown, now in its fifth week.

The package includes $5.7 billion “for a strategic deployment of physical barriers, or a wall” at the southwest border. In exchange, Trump said, his plan would provide “three more years of certainty” for 700,000 DACA recipients.

In September 2017, Trump ended President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. That program allowed young immigrants living in the country illegally who were brought here as children, often referred to as Dreamers, to remain in the U.S.

The Trump administration also ended temporary protected status for some 300,000 nationals from countries mostly in the Caribbean and Central America over the past 16 months.

Trump called his latest proposal “a common-sense compromise both parties should embrace.”

Even before he delivered his remarks, Democrats rejected the overture.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi released a statement in advance of Trump’s address.

“Unfortunately, initial reports make clear that his proposal is a compilation of several previously rejected initiatives, each of which is unacceptable and in total do not represent a good-faith effort to restore certainty to people’s lives,” she said.

Pelosi, who has called Trump’s plan for a wall an “immorality,” predicted that the Trump package could not pass in the House.

“For one thing, this proposal does not include a permanent solution for the Dreamers and TPS recipients that our country needs and supports,” she said.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer expressed similar sentiments.

“It was the president who single-handedly took away DACA and TPS protections in the first place,” Schumer said. “Offering some protections back in exchange for the wall is not a compromise but more hostage-taking.”

Trump spoke for 13 minutes from the White House diplomatic reception room on the 29th day of the shutdown. He did not mention the 800,000 federal workers who have been furloughed or working without paychecks.

He instead focused on what he called the “badly broken” immigration system and the “humanitarian” and “security crisis” at the southern border.

As soon as Trump’s remarks were over, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sent out a statement in which he said he plans to bring a measure with the Trump plan to a floor vote in the coming week.

Previously McConnell had said he would not present a measure to the Senate floor unless he knew Trump would sign it. Democrats had begun to pinpoint McConnell’s decision as an impediment to ending the shutdown.

While the shutdown drags on, the Washington blame game seems likely to continue unabated.

The fact that Democrats “rejected the proposal before they even heard of it goes to show that they’re not willing to take the necessary steps to open up the government. That’s a good deal. It’s time for Pelosi to put up or shut up,” GOP strategist Alice Stewart told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., issued a statement that read, “The President’s desperate political theater did not include any indication that he would end this shutdown soon. Stoking fear about immigrants will not help federal workers finally get the paychecks they have earned. Enough is enough with this reckless Trump shutdown.”

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., tweeted that while a debate over securing the borders is needed, “this President shouldn’t do it by holding federal workers & their families’ livelihoods hostage. We need to reopen the government & then have the debate.”

Mark Krikorian, of the pro-enforcement Center for Immigration Studies, found the Trump proposal to be “not unreasonable.”

Krikorian tweeted that if the compromise bill gets 50 votes but not the 60 votes needed to bring the measure to the floor, “then it really does become the Schumer Shutdown.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., told CNN that the president “is asking Border Patrol agents to work without pay.”

House Democrats, Lofgren said, are about to push legislation that would increase funding for border security, but the measure would not include money for Trump’s wall, Lofgren said. Instead, Democrats propose more spending on technology and ports of entry.

Trump’s package also proposes added funding for technology at the border and ports of entry.

Shortly before the remarks, Trump hosted a naturalization ceremony for five new U.S. citizens. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen administered the oath to new Americans from Iraq, the United Kingdom, Jamaica, Bolivia and South Korea.

In the diplomatic room, Trump noted that the ceremony celebrated America’s tradition of “welcoming legal immigrants from all over the world.”

Contact Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com or 202-662-7391. Follow @DebraJSaunders on Twitter. The Associated Press contributed to this report.