President Obama’s program that shields the so-called DREAMers from deportation is “probably dead” President Trump declared yesterday after a drama-filled week of high-stakes negotiations on immigration reform.
Congressional Democrats have been trying to blackmail the president, offering to swap border security funding for protecting approximately 700,000 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) claimants. Although Democrats are continuing to threaten to force a government shutdown in days unless an agreement protecting those benefitting from the constitutionally dubious DACA program is reached, “Democrats don’t really want” to resolve the issue, Trump tweeted Sunday morning.
Minutes later he added, “I, as President, want people coming into our Country who are going to help us become strong and great again, people coming in through a system based on MERIT. No more Lotteries! #AMERICA FIRST.”
DREAMers, by the way, are the stuff of leftist myth. The misleading sobriquet comes from the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act, a legislative proposal to grant underage illegals immigration amnesty. The conceit was invented to promote the illegal immigration Democrats need to win elections. They’re not the rock stars or rocket scientists people like DNC chief Tom Perez claim. Despite being sacred cows for progressives, DREAMers tend to be less educated and less established than typical Americans. Many can barely speak English and have little in the way of future prospects.
The open-borders lobby has been pressing an artificially-imposed deadline of this Friday, Jan. 19, for dealing with the DACA issue. On that date the federal government runs out of operating funds unless Congress approves stopgap funding.
At a dinner in Florida Sunday night, Trump told reporters he is “ready and willing to make a deal” on DACA, and repeated his assertion that Democrats aren’t.
“They don’t want security at the border,” the president said. “We have people pouring in. They don’t want security at the border. They don’t want to stop drugs, and they want to take money away from our military, which we cannot do. So those are some of the sticking points.”
The Trump administration has resumed processing DREAMer applications under DACA for those who missed an October deadline after a leftist judge in San Francisco ruled last week that Trump couldn’t end the program that President Obama created with the stroke of a pen. U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1999, wrote that Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ belief the program was unlawful seems to be “based on a flawed legal premise.”
News of potential progress on an immigration reform deal was overshadowed last week by a suspect Washington Post report based on unidentified sources that President Trump used a vulgarism to describe troubled Third World nations that most rational Americans try to avoid. The report, which Trump, Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) strenuously deny, was that the president referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations as “shithole countries” during a meeting Thursday about immigration reform with senators from both parties in the Oval Office. While coarse, the characterization is eminently fair and most Americans agree with it, Fox’s Tucker Carlson opined, but that didn’t stop the howling from leftist pundits that this supposed gaffe provided yet more proof of Trump’s alleged racism.
Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin’s (D-Ill.) confirmation that Trump used the naughty words may suggest Democrat leadership in the Senate isn’t interest in striking a deal with Trump. They’d prefer to wait until a Democrat president is in power. And Durbin has a history of lying about Republicans.
Durbin now seems intent on riling things up for partisan advantage. On Friday he made the jaw-droppingly idiotic assertion that President Trump’s use of the expression “chain migration” in the meeting the day before was somehow “painful” and offensive to black Americans whose ancestors were brought to this country chained up as slaves.
Durbin told reporters:
When it came to the issue of “chain migration,” I said to the president: “Do you realize how painful that term is to so many people? African Americans believe that they migrated to America in chains, and when you speak about chain migration, it hurts them personally.” He said: “Oh, that’s a good line.”
In fact Durbin has used the term previously without questioning its appropriateness and his Senate website contains it. Chain migration, which President Trump has vowed to end, is a readily accepted phrase on Capitol Hill, not an example of so-called fighting words, as Durbin is suggesting.
Perhaps Durbin was trying to stir the pot along the lines of then-Vice President Joe Biden’s widely condemned 2012 campaign trail remark to black Americans that Republicans were going to “put y’all back in chains” with their economic policies.
The White House meeting between President Trump and lawmakers on immigration issues that took place live on television Tuesday seems to have hurt Trump’s cause.
Trump’s people televised the meeting to showcase Trump’s competence and mental agility in order to throw water on yellow journalist Richard Wolff’s claims he is unfit to be president. But to many conservatives the meeting set off alarm bells for other reasons. Critics say Trump came across as far too conciliatory to the open-borders lobby and downplayed the importance of enforcing the law.
Many conservatives criticized Trump for being too soft as he seemed to back away from his get-tough approach to the enforcement of immigration law. The package discussed “would give DREAMers a chance at legal status and a path to citizenship, while restricting them from sponsoring their parents, eliminating the diversity visa lottery, and funding some border projects.”
Sen. Cotton described the plan as “unacceptable” because it doesn’t devote sufficient resources to border security, and fails to “end chain migration” and the diversity visa lottery.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said there is no agreement yet on immigration, “however, we still think we can get there.”
This article by Matthew Vadum first appeared Jan. 15, 2018, at FrontPageMag.
Note: I regret the subhed which seems to suggest I am unhappy that DREAMers are not getting relief.