In his Monday Twitter attack on Sen. Dick Durbin, President Trump didn’t sound like a man who was optimistic about a deal saving the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
After castigating “Dicky” Durbin, D-Ill., as someone who “misrepresented what was said” at a White House immigration meeting, Trump offered an assessment of the negotiations. “Deals can’t get made when there is no trust!” he tweeted. “Durbin blew DACA and is hurting our Military.”
DACA is an executive action by former President Barack Obama protecting from deportation undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as minors. Trump announced in September that it would be rescinded, saying Congress should use the intervening months to pursue a legislative fix.
Many Democrats have pushed for an earlier resolution, noting that beneficiaries are already starting to lose their work permits. Some hope to insert DACA in a must-pass government spending bill, risking a partial shutdown at the end of this week.
Now Trump is describing the DACA talks as “blown.” The president is clearly blaming the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate for the current impasse. Durbin reiterated Monday that Trump asked why the U.S. needed to accept immigrants from “shithole countries” during a White House meeting about hammering out a deal.
Durbin had previously said Trump made “hate-filled, vile, and racist” comments repeatedly. As a result of the controversy, the president had to spend Martin Luther King Jr. Day fending off fresh allegations of racism, months after facing bipartisan criticism of his handling of a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va.
“I’m the least racist person you’ll ever interview,” Trump insisted Sunday. But on Monday, Martin Luther King III, the slain civil rights leader’s eldest son, compared the president to longtime segregationist George Wallace.
Before the “shithole” firestorm, the basic contours of the DACA talks had taken shape. House Republicans have a bill by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., that the White House and most conservative immigration hawks like but lacks the bipartisan support necessary to get to 60 votes in the Senate. A bipartisan group of senators cobbled together a deal that went too far for some liberal Democrats, especially those representing communities of color, but not far enough for the Trump administration and its congressional allies.
Leading Democrats were conceding that a “clean” DACA bill was a nonstarter and that Trump’s immigration enforcement criteria needed to be dealt with in some form. Immigration hawks were generally willing to agree to “amnesty” for DACA recipients in exchange for countermeasures they thought would make future amnesties less likely.
With those parameters established, there was a basic question: Would the two sides be able to meet somewhere in the middle?
That was never going to be an easy feat. Trump brought together lawmakers with a diverse set of perspectives on immigration policy — if not diverse in other respects. Everyone from conservative restrictionist Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and David Perdue, R-Ga., to Democrats like Durbin and their GOP immigration ally Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., had a place at the table.
That already fragile working group was all but blown apart in the war over the president’s words. Graham, who claims to have chastised Trump for his remarks, is sniping at Cotton and Perdue, who claim not to have heard them. It is already harder to get black and Latino legislators to accept even the modest changes to the diversity visa lottery or chain migration envisioned in the Durbin deal, much less go further.
In fact, it might be more difficult to get progressives to accept dealing with Trump at all on DACA. One possibility, simply making cosmetic concessions to Trump on the border wall, could be harder to justify. “Shithole” is also ammunition for Democrats who want to attach DACA to the government funding showdown, making it harder for leadership to dissuade them from that course.
The immigration debate has reverted to where it was before Trump, all the way back to George W. Bush’s administration: House Republicans are taking a hard line; Senate Democrats are working with some Republicans on legislation unacceptable to immigration hawks with some House Democrats to their left.
What happens next is anyone’s guess. It’s possible both parties run on DACA in the midterm elections, but that would be a long time for DACA beneficiaries to wait for protection from possible deportation. Centrist Republicans in the House are already uneasy about taking a hard vote on the Goodlatte bill. The ten Democratic senators up for re-election this year in states Trump won in 2016 may also be feeling the heat — they are the most promising targets for the nine votes to pass an immigration bill and fund the government if Republicans remain unified and many of them could be hurt politically by perceived weakness on the borders.
Either a partial government shutdown related to this issue or the actual expiration of DACA, resulting in a policy outcome — the exposure of Dreamers to deportation — few people claim to want, could change the political calculus and bring the parties back to the negotiating table. Some people will blame the Democrats for leaking Trump’s comments, many others blame the president for making them in the first place. Or maybe the urgency of the looming March deadline could keep the talks going despite the obvious problems.
If there is a political backlash, Trump and his Democratic sparring partners won’t want to blow it again.
