President Trump said Wednesday that he was considering a pathway to citizenship of “10 or 12 years” for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals beneficiaries — though the details have not been finalized — in a proposal that would offer legal status to the group of young, undocumented immigrants in exchange for other reforms.
Trump also expressed openness to extending the DACA deadline past March 5, when Trump has ordered an end to the program that shields hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors from deportation.
“Yeah, I might do that,” Trump said during a meeting with reporters at the White House when asked about extending the deadline. “I’m not guaranteeing it… I certainly have the right to do that, if I want.”
Trump reiterated his commitment to reforming family-based immigration and ending the diversity visa lottery ahead of announcing a DACA proposal next week. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Wednesday that the administration would unveil an immigration “legislative framework” on Monday.
“We’re going to create a standard… so that not everybody you ever met can come into the country,” Trump said of chain migration, under which immigrants sponsor extended family members to come to the U.S. “But you’ll have wives and husbands and you’ll have sons and daughters.”
Throughout the process, the White House has supported limiting family reunification to spouses and minor children.
“We’ll talk about parents,” the president added. “Dealing with the parents is a tricky situation because they came here illegally.”
Trump once again stated his opposition to the visa lottery, a controversial program that granted entry to the suspected terrorist who killed eight people in New York City on Halloween last year. “The lottery system is a broken system,” he said. “They put people in a lottery. They’re not putting their finest in that system.”
A senior administration official said that the proposed pathway to citizenship for “Dreamers” is a “discussion point” and clarified that they were focusing on the 690,000 DACA enrollees rather than a larger population of potential beneficiaries.
The official said White House chief of staff John Kelly would go to the Capitol to deal with immigration rather than traveling to Davos, Switzerland with the president this week, arguing that the proposal floated by Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and others earlier this month does not fit with “the president’s version of solving this problem.”
Sanders has said the Durbin-Graham proposal is “dead on arrival” at the White House. She announced Wednesday that a framework for an immigration deal acceptable to the administration was coming Monday.
“This framework will fulfill the four agreed-upon pillars: securing the border and closing legal loopholes; ending extended-family chain migration; cancelling the visa lottery; and providing a permanent solution on DACA,” Sanders said. “After decades of inaction by Congress, it’s time we work together to solve this issue once and for all. The American people deserve no less.”
DACA was created by President Barack Obama after Congress failed to legislate the program’s protections with the DREAM Act. Critics described the creation of DACA as an improper use of executive power.
Trump announced the end of the program in September but gave lawmakers until March to provide a legislative solution for its beneficiaries.
Democrats have pushed for a solution ahead of that deadline, since some beneficiaries have already begun losing their protections. Senate Democrats withheld their votes last week from a short-term spending bill — partially shutting down the government in the process æ over the bill’s exclusion of DACA protections. Most Democrats voted for the spending bill on Monday after Senate Republicans promised to hold a vote on DACA legislation.
“We’re going to treat people very well,” Trump said Wednesday evening, “and we’re going to solve a problem that it a very tough problem to solve.”
