President Trump drew a line in the sand on immigration reform in a Tuesday morning tweet, telling Congress that the freewheeling negotiations that began Monday are “our last chance” to grant legal status to nearly 2 million people brought to America illegally as children.
Negotiations on DACA have begun. Republicans want to make a deal and Democrats say they want to make a deal. Wouldn’t it be great if we could finally, after so many years, solve the DACA puzzle. This will be our last chance, there will never be another opportunity! March 5th.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 13, 2018
Trump’s comments come at the top of what promise to be four crazy days for immigration debate in the Senate, with lawmakers debating the contentious topic in an unusually open format. As THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported Monday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is eschewing many of the traditional tools, like limiting amendments on the floor, that leadership generally uses to ensure the legislation under consideration doesn’t evolve beyond the caucus’s plans. Whichever immigration proposal can cobble together 60 votes is the proposal that will go to the House. (McConnell has also said he supports a package sponsored by top Republicans John Cornyn and Chuck Grassley, which hews close to the president’s proposed policies.)
Complicating matters is the fact that the White House has vacillated on how many planks of their immigration proposal, which includes a pathway to citizenship for former recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, increased funding for border security and a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, and new restrictions to our legal immigration system, are subject to compromise. In a bipartisan meeting with lawmakers on January 9, Trump said he’d be willing to sign any immigration bill Congress managed to send him.
“I think my positions are going to be what the people in this room come up with,” he said. “If they come to me with things I’m not in love with, I’m gonna do it. Because I respect them.”
But the president has taken a harder line since, tweeting last week that “any deal on DACA that does not include STRONG border security and the desperately needed WALL is a total waste of time.”
The White House considers the deadline for a DACA fix to be March 5, the day the program sunsets at the end of the six-month window Trump established when he revoked DACA last September. At that time, however, Trump apparently did not consider that date a “last chance” scenario.
“Congress now has 6 months to legalize DACA,” he tweeted on September 5. “If they can’t, I will revisit this issue!”
