Trump’s reviews at border are mixed

Some see ‘compromise’; others call it ‘blackmail’

SAN LUIS — It’s still several hours before many of the stores open, but Main Street is buzzing early Wednesday morning. At 4 a.m., hundreds of people, farm workers from southwestern Arizona and northern Mexico, assemble in small crowds.

These workers — a mix of legal U.S. residents and Mexican commuters with work visas — wait to board one of the dozens of white buses lining the street, which will take them to the fertile fields spanning Yuma County.

Late January marks the peak of the winter produce season, and workers will spend the day picking lettuce, beets, cauliflower and other vegetables that earned the area its nickname: “America’s winter salad bowl.”

It’s likely none of the workers watched President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address the night before. Bedtime comes early for those who work at 4 a.m. But that doesn’t mean they’re not up to date on

Trump’s policies, especially when it comes to his desire to build a border wall in their backyard.

During his televised address to Congress on Tuesday, Trump reiterated his call to build “a great wall on the southern border” in exchange for a pathway for citizenship for young undocumented immigrants known as “dreamers.”

“I would interpret that as blackmail,” Xochitl Beltran said. She lives in San Luis but must travel more than an hour for work to pick beets near Calexico, California. As a border resident with roots on both sides, she said she’s very much against building additional barriers on the border.

“I don’t agree with it. I take it as if we’re bad neighbors,” she added. “I see it as a bad thing, because it’s like we’re discriminating against the other country.”

Trump’s State of the Union message strikes a special chord in Yuma County, where many families, like Beltran’s, straddle the border and the population is nearly 63 percent Latino — but where the steel border fencing built in recent years has been trumpeted by federal officials as proof that “border walls work.”

Trump narrowly won the popular vote here, by about 500 ballots, in 2016, and he made Yuma his first visit to the U.S.-Mexico border as president.

Away from the bus line on Main Street, Trump’s message on immigration and national security is better-received. Republican leaders along the border expressed reserved optimism following the speech — and support for his framework in immigration and border security.

During the State of the Union address Tuesday, Trump pushed a broad framework on immigration and border security that includes four pillars, promising to sign a bill that will include all four. Such a bill remains elusive given that he would need support from Democrats, who have indicated they’re unlikely to sign off on all of them.

Those four pillars include a pathway for citizenship for 1.8 million dreamers, people brought to the country illegally as children. That number would include the nearly 800,000 currently shielded from deportation under President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA — a program the Trump administration is set to shut down.

But in exchange for those protections Democrats have actively sought in the past few weeks, Trump is asking for funding for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. He also wants to end the visa lottery system and move to a merit-based system, and to limit so-called “chain migration” — a description, considered offensive by some, for the process by which someone can sponsor relatives trying to immigrate to the United States.

“These four pillars represent a downthe-middle compromise and one that will create a safe, modern and lawful immigration system,” Trump said. “For over 30 years, Washington has tried and failed to solve this problem. This Congress can be the one that finally makes it happen.”

However, during several sections of the speech, Trump continued to paint immigrants as criminals, citing two attempted terrorist attacks as a reason to end the visa lottery and reduce familybased immigration. His most pointed examples were when talking about the drug gang MS-13, which began in Los Angeles but now has links across the U.S. and Latin America. Trump alleges that members use loopholes in the immigration system to enter the United States and commit crimes.

Following the speech, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, a key negotiator on DACA, seemed dejected, saying that Trump bringing up MS-13 gangs when talking about immigration hurt the cause.

“No one in the world defends them,” he said. “We’re talking about DACA and dreamers, for goodness’ sakes. It’s just two different worlds.”

Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels was in attendance in Washington as a guest of U.S. Rep. Martha McSally. The Republican lawman said that even though it’s not a perfect plan, he supports Trump’s framework because it provides a pathway for citizenship for dreamers, as well as border-security enhancements, which he has advocated for.

“As a public-safety official, it comes to quality of life in communities,” Dannels said.

“Bottom line is, I think what (Trump is) trying to express is there’s a lot of people coming across the border that are here for a really negative purpose, and that is to harm people up to the point of murder. … We can’t have that, you know? We can’t have that.”

For some Republicans, like Yuma Mayor Douglas Nicholls, Trump presented the right tone in his State of the Union speech, especially in nudging Congress to seek ways to work together and move beyond ideology.

But Nicholls added that any results will depend on the willingness of both sides to come to the table. He said that was especially true when it came to the Trump’s framework on immigration and border security.

“There’s an art that’s been lost for the past 20 years in D.C. called compromise, and I think that’s part of the decision where everyone gets some and gives some,” he said. “It does look to address the overall situation.”

Martin Porchas, the chair of the Yuma County Democratic Party, also expressed his support for providing dreamers a pathway to citizenship. But he said building a wall should not be a condition.

“We already have a fence. There is a fence. It’s been there for a while, so my idea is, why invest so much money when they can put it in different areas?” Porchas said.