DACA backers up against wall

WASHINGTON — Connecticut’s 8,000 or so DACA recipients have seen this movie before: The state’s Democratic delegation pushing with all its limited might to keep legal status for so-called Dreamers, only to run into President Donald Trump’s “wall” — both political and physical.

Trump has dug in on his demand that any consideration for youthful immigrants brought illegally to

the U.S. as children be conditioned on building his promised wall across the 2,000-mile length of the U.S. border.

And now he is topping it off with a further demand for ending “chain migration” — the practice of admitting relatives of foreignborn U.S. citizens or greencard holders.

“Democrats are doing nothing for DACA — just interested in politics,” Trump tweeted Tuesday. “DACA activists and Hispanics will go hard against

Dems, will start ‘falling in love’ with Republicans and their President! We are about RESULTS.”

Connecticut Democrats dispute that. At the urging of DACA recipients in the state, both Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy voted against the budget extension deal last month because it did not include language granting a reprieve to the nation’s 800,000 or so Dreamers.

In September, Trump canceled President Barack Obama’s 2012 Deferred

Action for Childhood Arrivals order, which set a deportation clock ticking.

On Wednesday, Senate and House leaders from both parties met with OMB Director Mick Mulvaney in House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office in an effort to negotiate a compromise.

They are working against the next government-funding deadline Jan. 19, which could result in a government shutdown if a deal is not struck. Whether that deal will include a DACA reprieve is anyone’s guess.

Some in Connecticut remain hopeful that a deal can indeed be struck.

“If 2017 was the year of tax-cut success and Obamacare repeal-and-replace failure, 2018 should be the year of the deal,” said Jim Campbell, a Westport real estate executive, former chairman of the Greenwich Republican Town Committee and Trump supporter.