The standstill on immigration legislation in Washington continues, as both the White House and congressional Democrats rejected each other’s proposals over the weekend, the Hill reports.
Although both sides agreed in their proposals on the amount of funding for a border wall, issues arose when deciding how to protect Dreamers. The Democrats rejected the Trump administration’s proposal, which included a $25 billion fund for construction of a border wall and an addition of two and a half years onto the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, sources told the Hill.
In their counter-proposal, Democrats included the $25 billion border wall funding partnered with a more secured pathway to citizenship for the 1.8 million Dreamers living in the United States. Despite President Donald Trump‘s previous support for this move, the White House rejected the offer, according to the Hill.
“The White House proposal gave them everything they asked for while leaving Dreamers in limbo,” a senior Democratic aide told Politico. “Our counter-offer lined up perfectly with what the president had proposed, but of course, he said no to his own deal. Again.” The stalemate makes it unlikely that the DACA decision will make it into this week’s spending bill before the Friday deadline, an effort to prevent the third government shutdown this year.
DACA, a program that allows undocumented immigrants brought into the country as children to work and go to school, continues to remain in place, after the White House announced last year that they were shutting down the program by March 5th, 2018, a deadline that passed with no enforcement from Congress. The new White House proposal would extend the program to the fall of 2020.
