Wall Street Journal
By Kristina Peterson
March 14, 2018
President Donald Trump has floated to congressional Republicans the idea of extending a program shielding young undocumented immigrants from deportation as part of an upcoming spending bill, according to GOP aides.
Amid the talk of a new proposal, both the White House and the Homeland Security Department issued statements saying they oppose any short-term agreement and continued to insist on a longer-term deal.
DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen wants a “permanent fix to DACA and lasting border security,” said DHS spokesman Tyler Houlton. “The secretary has been very clear that any legislation must reflect these two tenets,” Mr. Houlton said.
It wasn’t clear Wednesday if Mr. Trump was changing the demands he had set previously in the immigration debate. Mr. Trump has insisted on four policy pillars, and the DHS statement notably made no mention of two of them: cuts to family-based migration, and an end to the diversity-visa lottery, which admits 50,000 people chosen at random from countries that are underrepresented.
White House spokesman Raj Shah said the administration was open to including an immigration deal in the spending bill. But he specifically rejected one idea proposed by Sen. Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.) that would extend the DACA program for three years and provide three years of border-security funding.
“If there were a deal cut and that could be added to the omnibus, we would welcome that. But right now what was reported as a three-for-three deal is not something the White House would support,” he said.
Mr. Trump ended the Obama-era program in September and gave Congress until March 5 to pass its replacement. DACA protects young immigrants, often called Dreamers, from deportation and allows them to temporarily work legally in the U.S. Federal judges have blocked the administration from winding down the DACA program for now, easing the pressure on lawmakers to reach an immediate deal.
Lawmakers have been sharply divided over what should be in any immigration package. The Senate last month failed to pass any of a series of proposals aimed at combining an extension of the DACA program with other measures to boost border security and make changes to the immigration system.
Democrats were wary but hopeful Wednesday that the president would be open to a deal with them despite the failure of talks in February.
“He’s totally unreliable, but I am grasping at straws to find something to help 780,000 DACA people who run the risk of deportation,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.).
The Washington Post first reported the White House interest in including a DACA extension in the spending bill.
Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, a senior Senate Republican, said leaders might be open to the idea of including an immigration proposal in the spending bill, which they hope to unveil this week.
But Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R., Texas) said the litigation over DACA has taken the urgency out of needing to resolve the issue in the spending bill and didn’t expect a DACA provision to be included in it.
Last month, lawmakers agreed to a two-year budget deal setting overall funding levels and have been working for weeks on hashing out the details. They intend to pass a spending bill funding the government through the rest of the fiscal year, which runs until October.
Whether the spending bill should include border-wall funding has been a sticking point in negotiations. Democrats are willing to include funds for border security, but view a wall as expensive and ineffective. But Mr. Trump has made clear that he wants to build a wall and deliver on one of his core campaign promises.
The government’s current funding expires on March 23.
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