The president offered three-year protection for “Dreamers” and immigrants with protective status in exchange for $5.7 billion in border-wall funding. Democrats rejected it out of hand.
The 29th day of the partial government shutdown, the longest in U. S. history, has been virtually indistinguishable from the first.
On Saturday, President Donald Trump entered the Diplomatic Reception Room in the White House to reveal the “major announcement concerning the Humanitarian Crisis on our Southern Border” he had teased on Twitter on Friday. In some respects, it could be viewed as a major step toward ending the shutdown, with Trump outlining a new proposal to break a logjam that has left hundreds of thousands of federal workers without pay. And yet in other ways—with Democratic leaders roundly rejecting the plan before it was even aired—it may as well have never happened.
The White House proposed three years of protection for two categories of immigrants. The first group comprises about 700,000 young adults, known as “Dreamers,” who were brought to the United States as children without authorization; they had been protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the Obama-era policy that Trump sought to end before federal courts intervened. The second category, temporary protected status, covers people who were allowed to move to the United States after disasters hit their home country; Trump has similarly sought to cut back these protections, only to see his actions stopped in court.
In addition to three years of protection for Dreamers and TPS recipients, Trump also proposed $800 million for humanitarian assistance, presumably to the Central American countries where poverty and violence push migrants to leave for the United States; $805 million for drug-detection technology at the border; an additional 2,750 Border Patrol and law-enforcement agents; 75 new immigration-judge teams to reduce the backlog of nearly 1 million cases; and a system for Central American minors to apply for asylum from their home country.
And perhaps most important, the White House’s offer includes $5.7 billion for the “strategic deployment of physical barriers, or a wall”—the price tag that in many ways catalyzed the current impasse.
“This is not a 2,000-mile concrete structure from sea to sea,” Trump said. “These are steel barriers in high-priority locations,” covering about another 230 miles of the southern border.
Trump cast his proposal as a medium-term stopgap that buys time for Congress to negotiate a full-scale immigration-reform package, the sort of compromise that has eluded lawmakers for more than a decade. (In February, Democrats offered $25 billion for wall funding in return for a path to citizenship for the Dreamers, but the deal crumbled when Trump insisted upon further cuts to legal immigration.) A source familiar with the ongoing negotiations said that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would have the latest White House proposal ready for a floor vote by next week.
