As the government shutdown quickly moves towards the one-month mark, President Donald Trump proposed on Saturday live from the White House a plan to reopen the government. The immigration compromise would expand protections for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and extend the legal status of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients. This offer would be made in exchange for the $5.7 billion that the president has pushed for to fund his border wall.
According to Bloomberg, Democrats have rejected similar compromises and most likely won’t sign off on this one. Prior to the announcement, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement that the House wouldn’t pass Trump’s proposed plan.
“Initial reports make clear that his proposal is a compilation of several previously rejected initiatives, each of which is unacceptable and in total, do not represent a good faith effort to restore certainty to people’s lives,” Pelosi said. “It’s unlikely that anyone of these provisions alone would pass the House, and taken together, they are a non-starter.”
Until @realDonaldTrump and @senatemajldr McConnell open the government and stop holding workers hostage for their wall, I have only one response to their divide and conquer immigration proposals. pic.twitter.com/cItunNXeJa
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) January 19, 2019
In his speech on Saturday, Trump asked for hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for “urgent humanitarian assistance” and for “drug detection technology to help secure our ports of entry.” He also demanded for an additional 2,750 border agents and 75 new “immigration judge teams” to reduce backlog of 900,000 immigration cases.
Trump also proposed “three years of legislative relief for 700,000 DACA recipients” as an extension to “give them access to work permits, social security numbers and protections from deportation.” A similar three-year extension was proposed for TPS-holders.
As well, the president argued that the compromise’s ideas were “proposed by Democrats themselves” in the past. As Politico reported, Pelosi and other Democrats don’t think it’s a legitimate compromise to reopen government. Democrats also have insisted that they wouldn’t negotiate immigration and the border wall while the government remained partially closed.
Despite the opposition to the proposal, Politico reported that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Saturday that he will move forward on the legislation in Senate this week.
“With bipartisan cooperation, the Senate can send a bill to the House quickly so that they can take action as well,” McConnell said in a statement. “The situation for furloughed employees isn’t getting any brighter and the crisis at the border isn’t improved by show vots. But the President’s plan is a path toward addressing both issues quickly.”