House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said she would not sign off on an immigration reform bill from President Trump that didn’t allow a pathway to citizenship for the millions of people already in the country without documentation.
“It’s very important for our country to say the path to citizenship is the dignity these people need,” she said Wednesday morning on MSNBC.
Pelosi said one the areas that Democrats want to work with Trump, when the time comes, is immigration reform.
“If it’s something that forbids citizenship, no I couldn’t sign onto that. If we want to talk about — I think there are plenty of ways we can work in a bipartisan way on immigration, in fact we have to,” Pelosi said.
She said she was hopeful about Trump’s statements to news anchors Tuesday before his speech that reporters said were a sign he would be open to legal status for illegal immigrants who haven’t committed a crime. But Trump kept to his hardline immigration position during the speech, and Pelosi admitted that a shift by Trump would face blowback in his own party, she said.
“Whatever the president might propose, it’ll be interesting how the Congress disposes of it,” she said.
Pelosi said her conference isn’t planning on cooperating with Trump’s agenda for the time being because she sees nothing worth backing. She said Democrats would present their own agenda for governing when the time comes.
“When we believe the time is right, we will put forth our positive agenda, and not while people are enamored with a snake oil salesman,” she said. “All we have is rhetoric, we don’t have any legislation.”
