President Trump demanded in a tweet on Monday that any agreement to protect young immigrants from deportation must include his highly touted wall on the Mexican border, saying anything else is “a total waste of time.”
“Any deal on DACA that does not include STRONG border security and the desperately needed WALL is a total waste of time. March 5th is rapidly approaching and the Dems seem not to care about DACA. Make a deal!” Trump wrote to his more than 47 million followers.
Trump’s tweet came just hours before Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) introduced legislation on Monday that provides a path to citizenship for “Dreamers,” immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children by their parents.
The bipartisan legislation also addresses border security but does not contain money for funding a wall.
Coons said the bill is a “strong starting place” and said he’s willing to “build on it with more border security measures” but balked at a wall – which Trump vowed to his supporters he would build and make Mexico pay for during his 2016 presidential campaign.
He said security is needed but not “a single concrete wall monument, which is an inefficient and probably foolish investment of a huge amount of money because the geography of the border is so different in different places.”
The president has already rejected an earlier bipartisan bill authored by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).
A group of bipartisan senators, dubbed the Common Sense Coalition, has since been meeting privately to develop a broader immigration solution.
Absent a more comprehensive bill, Coons said his legislation should be the alternative to doing nothing.
“My concern is that there are now senators saying the fallback position should be almost literally doing nothing – like a one year DACA bill and a one-year border bill. This (legislation) stands between those two poles,” Coons said.
“This is a bill that I think should be our base bill. I don’t think we should do anything less than what’s in McCain-Coons. It’s my hope that in my next few days of negotiating that we will do something more. “
Trump last September ended the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and gave Congress six months to come up with a legislative fix.
That deadline expires March 5.
Democrats have made DACA a critical component of their cooperation to keep the government funded.
The fight over immigration and building the wall — a Trump campaign vow — is at the center of negotiations to keep the government operating past Thursday, when another temporary spending resolution must be approved.
The government shut down for three days last month when Democrats and Republicans in the Senate deadlocked over DACA.