Deal or No Deal for Trump on DACA—Who Knows?

That “something” is the Republican president’s purported deal with Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. According to Pelosi and Schumer, who issued a statement after their Wednesday night dinner at the White House, the three pols “agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a package of border security, excluding the wall, that’s acceptable to both sides.” The White House quickly downplayed the idea that wall funding was excluded from the deal, and President Trump himself tweeted Thursday morning that “no deal was made last night.”

Perhaps Trump believes there’s no finality to the deal, but his subsequent tweets and comments suggest what’s left is hammering out the final details. Some kind of protection for most of those covered by DACA is in the works, with, at best, some promises for an undetermined level of border security funding. “The wall will come later,” said Trump on the White House lawn Thursday morning. Not even the wall!

For a Republican president with majorities in both houses of Congress who ran on building a border wall and repealing “Obama’s executive amnesty,” there seems to be little policy upside to the burgeoning deal. For a goal prized by Democrats—enshrining the Obama-era protections for these illegal immigrants—Trump and Republicans got little of what they wanted. How did this happen?

The Trump administration had announced last week that the DACA program, the product of an executive action by President Obama, would be wound down over the next six months. The White House encouraged Congress to find a legislative fix for handling the hundreds of thousands of longtime U.S. residents who were brought into the country illegally as minors. GOP leadership and much of the Republican rank-and-file expressed an interest in some legislative fix, though the most hawkish immigration voices, particularly in the House, were skeptical or outright opposed.

This is where President Trump and House speaker Paul Ryan could have had some leverage. A DACA fix was always going to be a tough pill to swallow for House Republicans, but Trump might have threaded the needle if the fix had been paired by some kind of grand gesture toward conservatives on immigration—either something like Tom Cotton’s legal immigration reduction proposal or an explicit wall funding.

There were two recent actions by Trump that signaled his willingness to cut a deal like this. The first was his tweet that if Congress could not fix the DACA issue at the end of his six-month deadline, he would “revisit the issue.” That gave Republicans in Congress little incentive to actually expend political energy and capital heading into an election year to move on controversial and potentially divisive legislation. It also indicated that Trump was less eager than his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to actually end the DACA program outright.

The second action was Trump’s Oval Office debt-ceiling/Harvey funding deal with Pelosi and Schumer last week, which caught Republican leaders and Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin by surprise. Trump agreed to the three-month proposal to raise the debt ceiling from the Democratic leaders quickly, looking to put the issue of hurricane relief aid behind him. Pelosi and Schumer smelled blood.

An important caveat to all of this is that Trump’s latest deal on DACA isn’t set in stone. For one thing, an agreement among leadership does not always translate into a clean vote in Congress, and there’s no guarantee whatever the Trump-Pelosi-Schumer legislation ends up being finds a majority of support. For another, Trump himself is hard to pin down and hardly a reliable negotiator. Just hours after saying the wall would “come later,” the president said “ultimately” the wall should be part of the immigration deal.

“If we don’t have the wall, we’re doing nothing,” Trump said.