Trump attacks Oppn after it rejects his Mexico wall deal
SWORDS DRAWN Democrats to put to vote legislation to fund govt depts
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump on Sunday attacked top Democrat Nancy Pelosi after she rejected a deal on immigration and the Mexico border wall to resolve the 30-day-old government shutdown.
“Nancy Pelosi has behaved so irrationally & has gone so far to the left that she has now officially become a Radical Democrat,” Trump tweeted. “She is so petrified of the ‘lefties’ in her party that she has lost control.”
Responding to staunch antiimmigration commentators like Ann Coulter, who opposed his proposals as “amnestying”, Trump wrote: “No, Amnesty is not a part of my offer. It is a 3 year extension of DACA.” He was referring to his predecessor Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals programme that shields from deportation undocumented immigrants who entered the US as children. Trump said the Democrats rejected as a non-starter the proposal he announced on Saturday “before I even got up to speak”.
He had proposed three-year reprieve from deportation for 700,000 people protected so far under DACA, and those with temporary protection status (TPS) in return for $5.7 billion for his wall or barrier along the Mexico border. He also proposed funding to hire more border patrol officers and immigration judges among other things.
On Sunday , Trump appeared to signal support for amnesty as part of a broader immigration agreement. “Amnesty will be used only on a much bigger deal, whether on immigration or something else,” he tweeted. “Likewise there will be no big push to remove the 11,000,000 plus people who are here illegally-but be careful Nancy!”
Pelosi had said nearly half an hour before Trump’s address that “his proposal is a compilation of several previously rejected initiatives, each of which is unacceptable”. She said the key problem was the lack of a permanent solution on the situation of the so-called“dreamers” protected under DACA and those with TPS.
The No. 3 House Democrat on Sunday offered a path for a deal that could end the shutdown, focused on a permanent solution for Dreamers, rather than the three-year reprieve offered by Trump.
“Let’s go back and forth on this and see where we can find common ground,” House Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina told Fox News.
Democrats plan to put to vote a set of bills of their own in the House of Representatives next week to fund the shuttered governments departments.