The White House is losing in its plan to win over the Democrats with a deal to provide citizenship to Dreamers in exchange for funding for strict restrictions on legal immigration. The Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer is against the immigration framework that was released by the White House. This is potentially a fatal blow for the potential legislation in the closely divided Senate.
Schumer on Friday accused President Donald Trump of using a proposed path to citizenship for young, undocumented immigrants in the US as a front for making far-reaching and damaging changes to the legal immigration system. Schumer took to Twitter and commented that Trump’s plan flies in the face of what most Americans stand for. He continued to say that while Trump finally accepted that the “Dreamers” should be allowed to stay in the country and gain US citizenship, he uses them as a bargaining chip to tear apart the legal immigration system and take up that which anti-immigration hard-liners have advocated for years.
The proposal that was released by the White House on Friday would allow roughly 1.8 million young immigrants to gain US citizenship. It also called for $25 billion in government funding on a border wall and security as well as increasing restrictions on family-based immigration and retracting the visa lottery system. Despite White House officials’ hope that the proposal is put up for a vote, it appears doomed to fail.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House press secretary, hastily shot back in a tweet. She said that Schumer prefers open borders and sanctuary cities over law and order and popular, common sense reforms. Shortly afterward, President Trump tweeted a personal insult aimed at Schumer. He said that DACA had been made more difficult by the fact that Schumer took such a hard hit over the shutdown that he is unable to act on immigration.
The Senate minority leader’s remarks continue to cement the party’s opposition. This leaves little clarity on how Congress will secure an agreement to preserve the fast-expiring legal protections for beneficiaries of the DACA program. A bipartisan group of Senate members plans to meet over the coming two weeks to try and find a proposal that would pass the Senate with excellent support. They hope that the deal they come up with will be accepted by the House and that Trump will sign it.
