Hopes for immigration deal fade amid barbs

WASHINGTON — Prospects for a bipartisan agreement to protect young immigrants from deportation and prevent a government shutdown later this week faded Sunday as key lawmakers traded sharp accusations and President Donald Trump said hopes for a deal were “probably dead.”

Negotiators spent last week seeking a solution that would shield young immigrants brought illegally to the United States as children, including the roughly 800,000 who secured work permits under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program created under President Barack Obama.

But a tentative deal worked out Thursday by a small bipartisan group of senators crumbled in an Oval Office meeting in which, according to multiple people involved, an angry Trump asked them why the United States should accept immigrants from “shithole countries” such as Haiti, El Salvador and African nations over those from European countries such as Norway.

A pair of GOP senators — Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia — who attended the meeting and previously said they could not recall the use of the vulgar phrase denied outright on Sunday that Trump had ever said it. That prompted Democrats to accuse them of impugning a fellow senator’s credibility, a development that could further poison the bipartisan talks.

“Both sides now are destroying the setting in which anything meaningful can happen,” said Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Trump offered a vague denial Friday, and on Sunday, he declared the talks to be failing.

“DACA is probably dead because the Democrats don’t really want it, they just want to talk and take desperately needed money away from our Military,” he said on Twitter.

Democrats have tied the immigration talks to spending negotiations being held ahead of a Friday shutdown deadline. Republicans are seeking an increase in military spending; Democrats want a DACA deal and a matching increase in nondefense funding.

The sole Democratic participant in the Oval Office meeting, Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, told reporters Friday that Trump had used the vulgar word “not just once but repeatedly” during the meeting. A Republican attendee, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, issued a statement that did not specifically confirm the words used but backed up Durbin’s account.

The accounts of the meeting, however, have not fallen neatly along party lines.

Besides Graham’s endorsement of Durbin’s account, Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said Sunday on “This Week” that he had spoken to participants in the meeting immediately afterward — before The Washington Post publicly reported Trump’s use of the vulgar term.

“They said those words were used before those words went public,” Flake said.

Sen. Michael F. Bennet, D-Colo., speaking Sunday on “Meet the Press,” said, “There’s no question what he said was racist. There’s no question what he said was un-American and completely unmoored from the facts.”

But Paul called those accusations unfair and instead accused the media of going “completely bonkers with just ad hominem (attacks) on the president,” blaming the potential failure of the talks on the outcry over Trump’s remarks.

“I do want to see an immigration compromise, and you can’t have an immigration compromise if everybody out there is calling the president a racist,” Paul told “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd.

The tentative deal unveiled Thursday would give legal status and a pathway to citizenship for dreamers while also providing $2.7 billion for border security — some of which could be used to construct the border wall Trump has proposed. The visas now offered under the lottery system would be reallocated to other immigration programs, such as one offering temporary status to citizens of nations in crisis - like the ones Trump referenced in his Oval Office remarks.

Trump said in a second tweet Sunday that he wanted more aggressive measures in any deal: “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!”

Echoing dozens of Democrats, Lewis said he would not vote for any government spending measure until the dreamer issue is settled.

Republicans cannot pass a government funding bill without Democratic votes. There are 51 Senate Republicans in a chamber in which 60 votes are needed to pass major legislation, and GOP leaders are also facing problems in the House, where some Republican members have balked at the prospect of passing another stopgap that does not increase military funding.