President Donald Trump said Friday that he’s ‘not happy’ with the pace of immigration talks and an agreement ‘could very well not happen’ by a critical March deadline.
As he has in recent days, the president lashed out at Democrats balking at a deal he offered them to put Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival recipient on a pathway to citizenship. ‘They’ve given up on DACA,’ he said.
‘We wanna make a deal. I think they want to use it for political purposes, for elections. I really am not happy with the way it’s going, from the standpoint of the Democrats,’ Trump said Friday at a Customs and Border Protection facility in Virginia.
President Donald Trump said Friday that he’s ‘not happy’ with the pace of immigration talks and an agreement ‘could very well not happen’ by a critical March deadline
‘We wanna make a deal. I think they want to use it for political purposes, for elections. I really am not happy with the way it’s going, from the standpoint of the Democrats,’ Trump said Friday at a Customs and Border Protection facility in Virginia
Without congressional action, DACA work permits will begin to expire on March 5. That’s the deadline the Trump administration mandated when it cut off the program that Justice Department lawyers ruled unconstitutional.
Trump said Friday, ‘DACA is something that should be absolutely easy to do.’
‘And I don’t think the Democrats want to take care of the DACA recipients,’ he declared. ‘And think of it, they’ve given up on DACA and that’s supposed to be theirs, but it’s ours because we’re the ones that are taking care of DACA, not them.’
Yesterday evening Trump claimed that all Democrats do is ‘obstruct’ and ‘resist’ as he spoke about immigration reform at a Republican Party function.
‘You know the Democrats are AWOL. They’re missing in action. We’re saying, where are they? We have a proposal, we never hear from them,’ Trump said.
Earlier on Thursday, at another Republican Party event Trump gave Democrats an ultimatum on immigration.
Trump said the minority party could accept his immigration compromise or they’ll get ‘nothing at all.’
Speaking at the GOP’s annual retreat in West Virginia, Trump said Democrats might as well ‘come on board’ with his plan to build a border wall and give 1.8 million illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children a pathway to citizenship because ‘we are not going to improve it.’
‘We have to get help from the other side, or we have to elect many more Republicans. That’s another way of doing it, really that’s another way of doing it,’ Trump said. ‘They talk a good game with DACA but they don’t produce.’
The president also said that it was a ‘trap’ to refer to the illegal immigrant youth he’s offering to protect as ‘Dreamers’ in another slap at Democrats.
‘It’s not Dreamers. Don’t fall into that trap,’ he stated. ‘It’s much different than Dreamers.’
Democrats were low-hanging fruit for Trump on this week as he traveled to West Virginia for lunchtime remarks to lawmakers on Thursday flew back to Washington for the evening address to Republican National Committee members and visited a Department of Homeland Security facility in Sterling, Virginia on Friday.
Trump began his day his day Thursday as he ended it: zeroing in on Democrats and the fight over the status of the illegal immigrant youth.
‘March 5th is rapidly approaching and the Democrats are doing nothing about DACA,’ Trump tweeted first thing in the morning. ‘They Resist, Blame, Complain and Obstruct – and do nothing.’
Trump urged his massive social media following to ‘start pushing Nancy Pelosi and the Dems to work out a DACA fix, NOW!’
The president told the party faithful in his afternoon remarks at a GOP retreat, taking place at luxury resort The Greenbrier, that he wants an ‘immigration policy that’s fair, equitable but that’s gonna protect our people.’
‘We want people coming into our country based on merit and based on the fact that they are going to love our country and they respect our people and our country.’
Mimicking a lotto worker Trump said, ‘We don’t want visa lottery, pick a lottery ticket, pick a lottery – we don’t want that. So, we want it based on merit.’
Last week, the White House rolled out a four-pillar framework for an immigration deal.
Trump said he would grant a pathway to citizenship to 1.8 million illegal immigrants who arrived in the U.S. in their youth – which the president says was ‘generous’ because it would go beyond the people who were eligible for DACA – in return for the $25 billion he requested for his border wall and for border security.
The White House also wants chain migration contained to just the nuclear families of green card holders and wants to end the visa lottery program.
‘Either they’re going to have to come on board, because they talk a good game with DACA but they don’t produce,’ Trump told Republican lawmakers on Thursday, ‘or we’re just going to have to really work to get more people, in a much easier fashion legislation.’
In early September,Trump’s Justice Department announced the phasing out of the DACA program, an Obama-era initiative that allowed the so-called ‘Dreamers.’
The plight of the ‘Dreamers’ has been central to months of drama on Capitol Hill.
President Trump pressured Democrats to work out a deal on DACA in a Thursday morning tweet
He also said that he would be talking DACA at the Republican retreat in West Virginia Thursday as Trump addresses a lunchtime session
On Tuesday evening Trump stirred the pot in his State of the Union speech when he said, ‘Americans are dreamers, too.’
Touching on the remarks Thursday, he said, ‘We have dreamers in this country, too. We can’t forget our dreamers. I have a lot of dreamers here.’
The ‘Dreamers’ reference was one of the most talked about from Trump’s Tuesday night State of the Union address.
‘I am extending an open hand to work with the members of both parties – Democrats and Republicans – to protect our citizens of every background, color, religion and creed,’ he said Tuesday, with ‘citizen’ being the vital word.
The ‘dreamers’ line drew praise from white nationalist leader David Duke, many Democrats, on the other hand, had brought ‘dreamers’ as their guests.
Last month, the president rejected a bipartisan proposal from a group of centrist senators, which led to a three-day government shutdown.
He and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also had a back-and-forth over DACA and the president’s proposed border wall, but when negotiations broke down the White House quickly dubbed the government’s closure the ‘Schumer shutdown.’
Next week there’s yet another government funding deadline on Friday, Feb. 8, which means the government could shut down again.
House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows said Thursday while speaking to reporters at the Republican retreat that he did not anticipate another lapse in federal funding.
The leader of the House conservatives did add a caveat: ‘I didn’t anticipate one last time.’
‘I think the president has probably been out there leading on immigration more so than most presidents,’ he added, preparing to hear from Trump at the retreat later Thursday. ‘I mean, he set four pillars, he’s, you know, outlined what he would like to see, it’s now incumbent upon Congress to work.’
‘I mean the fact that we do not have a plan, here on February 1, five months into a six-month timeline is troubling,’ Meadows said.
Speaker to reporters first thing in the morning on Thursday, Sen. John Thune, head of the Republican Conference in the Senate, suggested that the four-pillared White House plan may have to be shaved down to two: DACA and the border wall.
A two-prong solution, ‘may be the best we can hope for,’ Thune said.
But proving just how far lawmakers are away from a deal, even within their own party, Meadows immediately dismissed the South Dakota senator’s position.
‘To suggest that we’re going to give, in my mind, a clean DACA for a few billion dollars, that will not really secure our border is a non-starter,’ Meadows said.
Sen. David Perdue of Georgia, a co-author of legislation that Trump has endorsed that would reorient the immigration system around skills-based labor, said Thursday afternoon that he would ‘absolutely’ support a bill based off the president’s demands that combined illegal and legal immigration measures.
‘I absolutely support that framework and would be proud to vote for that framework and I’m one of the more conservative members of the Senate,’ Perdue pledged, saying it was his sense that lawmakers were coming around to Trump’s position.
Standing beside him House Budget Chairman Steve Womack pointed that no such legislation currently exists, however.
‘Look, I don’t vote on frameworks, I vote on legislation as it’s presented,’ he stated.