President Donald Trump is considering a short-term immigration deal that lacks many of his previous demands. The White House has told Republican Congressional leaders that the President would be willing to agree to a plan to protect young immigrants in exchange for funding for the wall on the border between the US and Mexico, which formed much of Trump’s 2016 Presidential election campaign, according to the Washington Post on Wednesday.
The deal could be included in a spending bill that needs to be passed by Congress before midnight on 23 March. Trump has previously insisted on much broader changes to US immigration policy in return for any deal protecting ‘Dreamers’, the young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as minors and were protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Raj Shah, a spokesman for the White House, said that a deal involving three years of funding for the border wall in return for a three-year DACA extension would not be acceptable. He said that one of the government’s most vital functions is to secure the border, adding that the Trump administration continues to try to negotiate a deal to address DACA while modernizing the US immigration system and preventing more illegal immigration.
Some Congressional Republicans are unimpressed with the idea. The immigration hard-liner Representative, Steve King, said that conservatives will not tolerate forcing amnesty for the Dreamers into a bill that has to be passed.