Trump plan offers citizenship path to 1.8 million immigrants

President Donald Trump is proposing a plan that provides a path to citizenship for 1.8 million of the so-called “Dreamer” immigrants, tighter restrictions on legal immigration and $25 billion in border security, the White House said, putting forward an outline likely to find resistance from some of Trump’s conservative allies.

Senior White House officials offered a preview of Trump’s immigration framework Thursday, casting it as a compromise that could pass the Senate. The proposal represents a reversal for the president, who once promised to eliminate an Obama-era program protecting immigrants brought to the U.S. as children and now in the country illegally. He later urged lawmakers to extend the program, but maintained he was not considering citizenship.

The Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program currently covers roughly 690,000 of those younger immigrants — about half the number who qualified for the program, according to independent estimates. Trump’s plan would expand this further by adjusting some of the requirements, officials said, but they would not offer specific details. It would not allow parents of those immigrants to seek lawful status, the officials said.

On Wednesday, Trump said he was open to a pathway to citizenship for younger immigrants brought illegally to the U.S. as children. “We’re going to morph into it,” Trump told reporters. “It’s going to happen, at some point in the future, over a period of 10 to 12 years.”