On Wednesday night, President Trump had dinner at the White House with
Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the top two Democrats in Congress. The
three were said to be going over some of the President’s key legislative
priorities, including tax reform, immigration, infrastructure, and
trade. But, afterward, Pelosi and Schumer released a triumphant
statement saying that the evening’s discussion had centered on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a policy that shields young undocumented immigrants from deportation. Last week, the President cancelled DACA—to
the delight of his anti-immigrant supporters—but he appeared to regret
the move almost as soon as he made it. He has since made several pleas
for Congress to take action to protect DACA recipients before March,
when the policy will begin to phase out. On Wednesday night, Pelosi and
Schumer announced that they had struck a deal with Trump on the issue.
“We agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly,” the
Democratic leaders’ statement read, “and to work out a package of border
security, excluding the wall”—meaning Trump’s signature campaign pledge
to build a giant wall on the southern border—“that’s acceptable to both
sides.” The White House issued its own, more circumspect, statement,
listing DACA as just one of the topics that came under discussion. But
Pelosi and Schumer were openly gloating, and the White House’s words did
little to calm Trump’s right-wing supporters. “Trump base is blown up,
destroyed, irreparable, and disillusioned beyond repair,” Steve King, a
Republican congressman from Iowa, tweeted, responding to a report of the
agreement. A series of Trump tweets on Thursday morning left his
supporters feeling only more dismayed and confused. While denying that a
deal had been formalized, the President tweeted, “Does anybody really
want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have
jobs, some serving in the military? Really!”
Whether all this leads to real action on DACA remains far from certain.
For more than a decade and a half, Congress has failed to pass
legislation to protect Dreamers, as undocumented immigrants who came to
the United States as kids are known. The nickname derives from a bill,
first introduced in 2001, called the DREAM Act, which would grant these
immigrants a path to citizenship. Versions of the bill have been proposed and voted
down repeatedly over the years, but Democrats are now as optimistic as
they’ve ever been. On Wednesday, a few hours before Trump dined with
Pelosi and Schumer, I spoke to Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat from
Illinois, who sponsored the earliest version of the DREAM Act and has
been trying to pass it ever since. “Ironically, when you consider the
campaign the President ran and the current fears in the immigrant
community, we may be in a better position now to pass the DREAM Act than
when we first introduced it,” he told me. “There’s a sense of urgency
and a growing consensus behind us.”
The shift owes to a number of factors coming into unlikely
alignment. The Trump Administration’s immigration-enforcement policies
are so aggressive that there are serious concerns about the increasing
vulnerability of Dreamers, who, polls show, have the support of an
overwhelming majority of Americans. Since 2012, when President Obama
created DACA, almost a million Dreamers have been granted “lawful
status,” allowing them to work, study, and live without fear of
deportation. Americans view their presence in the county differently
from that of other undocumented immigrants. “It’s a totally different
psychological reaction when you have seven hundred and eighty thousand
people with something that’s about to be taken away,” Durbin said.
Despite their relatively small numbers, Dreamers have also become an
organized and powerful political constituency since DACA was issued.
“The momentum is on our side,” Cristina Jiménez, the executive director
of United We Dream, the largest youth-led immigrant group in the
country, told me. “C.E.O.s stand with us. Celebrities stand with us.
Over seventy per cent of Americans support protecting undocumented young
people from deportation, and more than fifty per cent support a pathway
to citizenship.”
Democrats are onboard, as are a handful of moderate Republicans. The
latest version of the DREAM Act has already been introduced in both the
House and the Senate, and has a core group of bipartisan supporters in
both chambers. The question is how it will fare among Republicans more
broadly. The timing is tricky: in March, when DACA will begin to sunset,
the 2018 primary season will just be getting under way. This has many in
Washington looking for measures that will be more acceptable to
conservatives. One bill, called the Recognizing America’s Children Act, was introduced in the House six months ago, and has the support of
thirty Republican representatives. But Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican
from North Carolina, who is the bill’s putative sponsor in the upper
chamber, recently told the Miami Herald that for now he was prioritizing other issues, like tax reform, infrastructure, and disaster relief. “Immigration is up
there, but we can’t shift our focus away from the thing that may get the
most headlines over the next week,” he said.
Trump’s dinner with the Democrats might not change Republicans’ over-all
sense of urgency. “We’re not at the competition stage yet,” one senior
Senate Republican aide told me. “Senator Tillis has a bill which is
close to the DREAM Act. That’s good. It at least shows he’s in play.”
The real sticking point, regardless of which bill emerges as Congress’s
favorite, will be whether the “border security” measures referred to by
Pelosi and Schumer afford Republicans what they feel is the necessary
political cover. According to the Republican Senate staffer, the 2013
push to pass comprehensive immigration reform will serve as the starting
point. At that time, two Republicans senators—Bob Corker, of Tennessee,
and John Hoeven, of North Dakota—introduced an amendment with a few key
inducements for their colleagues: hiring twenty thousand more Border
Patrol agents, erecting three hundred and fifty more miles of fencing
along the border, and instituting an E-Verify protocol to insure that
employers were hiring only legal workers. These measures are all seen as
fairly standard concessions in immigration deals at this point, and it’s
inevitable that they should come up in negotiations over Dreamers. The
border wall, which Trump has championed since the first days of his
Presidential campaign, would have made a deal impossible for Democrats.
But Trump appears willing to proceed without it.
When such a bill would move forward is also still unclear. Prominent
immigrant-rights advocates, like Marielena Hincapié, of the National
Immigration Law Center, say that the goal is to get legislation done
before the end of the year. Yet even congressional Republicans who are
supportive of the effort, like Mike Coffman, a Republican representative
from Colorado, aren’t sure this is possible. “There’s so much other
stuff going on,” he told me. “Tax reform, the possibility of circling
back on health care, a budget-appropriations bill. But I’m very
confident this will get done in the six-month window.” Nevertheless, he
saw Trump’s buy-in as a major advantage. “There’s a reluctance to stick
your neck out in red districts,” he told me. “The President is concerned
about his base. It really helps, because there’s no division here. The
President is going to be selling this. And he’s also going to be saying,
‘This is O.K. We’re securing the border, too.’ ”