TRUMP MAKES A DEAL
Democratic leaders say they have agreements on protecting young ‘Dreamers’ from deportation and a border-security plan that doesn’t include the president’s long-promised wall,
WASHINGTON— Democratic leaders on Wednesday night declared that they had a deal with President Donald Trump to quickly extend protections for young unauthorized immigrants and to finalize a border security package that does not include the president’s proposed wall.
After a White House dinner with the president, the Democrats — Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York and Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California — released a joint statement that appeared aimed at ensuring that the president would follow through after their discussions on the program known as Deferred Action for Child- hood Arrivals, or DACA.
“We had a very productive meeting at the White House with the president,” the statement said. “The discussion focused on DACA. We agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a package of border security, ex- cluding the wall, that’s acceptable to both sides.”
In its own statement, the White House was far more muted, mentioning DACA as merely one of several things that were discussed.
“President Donald Trump had a constructive working dinner with Senate and House minority leaders, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, as well as administration officials to discuss policy and legislative priorities,” the statement said.
“These topics included tax reform, border security, DACA, infrastructure and trade. This is a positive step toward the president’s strong commitment to bipartisan solutions for the issues most important to all Americans. The administration looks forward to continuing these conversations with leadership on both sides of the aisle.”
A White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private dinner insisted that the president had stressed his interest in seeing the border wall funded. The wall was a key campaign pledge, but Democrats are vehemently against it.
According to a person briefed on the meeting, the president said at the dinner that he was not tethering wall funding to the DACA solution. Trump recently began to wind down DACA, which has provided protection from deportation for roughly 800,000 young unauthorized immigrants. But he has been torn about it, and he has made clear he would like a legislative fix.
The president heads into the fall legislative season with few major achievements in his first eight months in office.
The meeting Wednesday was described as a followup to one that Schumer and Pelosi held in the Oval Office last week with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, at which Trump astonished his own advisers by leaping at a deal offered by Democrats to attach a stopgap spending bill and debt-ceiling increase to a package of recovery aid for areas affected by hurricane Harvey.