USA Today
By Alan Gomez
October 09, 2017
The White House just pushed the immigration debate back where it all began: a stalemate.
On Sunday night, the Trump administration released a list of hard-line immigration priorities that includes funding for a border wall and a crackdown on unaccompanied minors fleeing Central America – a wish list that effectively quashed Democrats’ hopes that Trump may finally be cajoled into finding a bipartisan compromise on a core campaign promise.
Last month, Trump said he and Democratic leaders were close to finalizing a deal to protect young undocumented immigrants who came into the country illegally as children. He even suggested that he wouldn’t let his previous insistence on funding a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border get in the way. “The wall will come later,” he said on Sept. 14.
Since then, supporters of those young undocumented immigrants known as DREAMers have been encouraged by the prospect of a breakthrough on Capitol Hill – since even Republicans have floated bills to protect them from deportation.
That momentum appeared to collapse this weekend when the White House – along with the departments of Justice, Commerce, and Homeland Security – called for 18 different policy proposals to limit both legal and illegal immigration.
That wish list closely mirrors the tough immigration platform Trump trumpeted on the campaign trail. It calls for more immigration agents to arrest undocumented immigrants and more immigration judges to deport them. It calls for an expansion of the southern border wall to keep undocumented immigrants out of the country, and an overhaul of the legal immigration system to limit the number of visas and green cards granted each year.
Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, a group that advocates for lower levels of legal and illegal immigration, said the laundry list of proposals from the White House “is certain to reassure and even thrill” his members.
Those who felt Trump was turning a corner on immigration, however, were left to wonder what to do next.
They had heard his talk on immigration and thought he might be willing to buck the GOP, as he has in other areas, and strike a grand bargain. After all, Trump spoke of treating DREAMers “with heart” and hinted that he might save them himself if Congress failed to act.
It’s possible Trump could still follow through on that promise. Trump himself has not yet commented on this list of immigration demands – and the White House may see these principles as a starting point for negotiations that could stretch out for months.
Yet ever since Trump spoke publicly about a deal after dinner with Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer, the House and Senate minority leaders, his aides have been driving a hard bargain. Prominent adviser Stephen Miller, who has been a longtime critic of U.S. immigration policies, has been leading the charge on Capitol Hill.
All the while, the Trump administration has been taking concrete steps that clearly point in the opposite direction. Since assuming office, the Trump administration has:
Announced the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, an Obama-era program that has protected nearly 800,000 young undocumented immigrants from deportation;
Issued new directives to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents that vastly expands the pool of the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants that can be arrested;
Redirected more than 100 new immigration judges to more quickly process deportation cases, leading to a 21% increase in cases closed, according to Justice.
Threatened to withhold federal funding from so-called “sanctuary cities” that do not fully comply with requests from federal immigration officials;
Ended a hotline created by the Obama administration to help undocumented immigrants and replaced it with a hotline for victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants.
Given that backdrop, immigration advocates are left where they started when Trump first assumed office — completely unsure of where Trump stands.
“It would be foolhardy for us to depend on a chemically-imbalanced president to gain victory,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a group that advocates for immigrants.
Instead, Sharry and other advocates are placing their faith in Congress. With a December deadline on a funding bill, they are hoping that a coalition of Democrats pushing hard for a DREAM Act, mixed with enough Republicans who want to protect them, will be enough to craft a reasonable compromise.
Then it will be up to Trump to decide whether to embrace that kind of deal.
“Does he want the narcissistic high of a bipartisan deal followed by good headlines and a polling bump, or does he want the narcissistic high of going to campaign rallies where he says he stood up to the Democrats and declared his reconstructed nativism once again?” Sharry said.
Given his vacillation on the issue, which will it be?
“God knows,” Sharry said.
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