By MAGGIE HABERMAN, KATIE ROGERS and MICHAEL D. SHEAR
JAN. 24, 2018 - The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Wednesday that he is open to a path to citizenship after 10 to 12 years for hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, days after rejecting a bipartisan plan with that as its centerpiece.
Mr. Trump once again seemed to undercut his administration’s message, telling reporters at the White House that he would allow the young immigrants, known as Dreamers, to “morph into” citizens over a period of time.
The reporters had gathered for a briefing from a senior official detailing the administration’s plans to stick to a restrictive immigration agenda when the president dropped in unprompted, shortly before departing for Davos, Switzerland, pre-empting the official.
“Over a period of 10 to 12 years,” Mr. Trump said, “somebody does a great job, they work hard — that gives incentive to do a great job. Whatever they’re doing, if they do a great job, I think it’s a nice thing to have the incentive of, after a period of years, being able to become a citizen.”
In September, Mr. Trump ended an Obama-era program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, saying it was an illegal assertion of executive authority by his predecessor. But even as Mr. Trump’s actions threatened nearly 700,000 young immigrants with deportation when the program expires March 5, he has urged Congress to find a permanent solution that could allow them to live and work in the country legally.
In addition to suggesting a pathway to citizenship for the Dreamers, Mr. Trump said that he would request $25 billion to build a wall along the United States border with Mexico, though he said he would build it “way under budget.” He also said that his plan would include a request for $5 billion for additional security measures along the border.
The fate of the Dreamers is at the center of a furious stalemate in Congress, where Republicans and Democrats are struggling to find a compromise. Mr. Trump’s positions have been difficult to discern, vacillating between his expressions of sympathy for the DACA recipients and his hard-line demands for a crackdown on illegal immigrants.
Mr. Trump campaigned for the presidency with nativist rhetoric that assailed the threat from outsiders, especially Mexicans and Muslims. As president, he quickly tried to impose a travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries and gave immigration agents more authority to round up undocumented immigrants.
But he also once said that he wanted “a bill of love” to address the fate of the DACA recipients.
Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, who is a hard-line conservative on immigration issues, reiterated that any deal on immigration would have to include Republican demands for tougher enforcement on immigration, saying on Twitter that “it must be done responsibly, guaranteeing a secure & lawful border & ending chain migration, to mitigate the negative side effects of codifying DACA.”
Mr. Trump’s remarks drew support from Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who has in recent weeks been at the forefront of efforts to reach an immigration deal. Mr. Graham had been one of the architects of the bipartisan plan rejected by Mr. Trump.
“President Trump’s support for a pathway to citizenship will help us get strong border security measures as we work to modernize a broken immigration system,” Mr. Graham said in a statement. “Finally, with this statement we are on track to solving the immigration problem, which is the political key to rebuilding our military.”
Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who in 2001 first sponsored the “DREAM Act” to provide legal status to the young immigrants, also praised the president. “The President is headed in the right direction here,” Mr. Durbin wrote Wednesday evening on Twitter.
As the Trump administration struggled in recent days to produce an on-message stance on immigration, Mr. Trump has kept largely out of sight, as his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, coordinated with Republican leaders while they worked with Democrats to reopen the government after a three-day shutdown.
Mr. Kelly and Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s senior policy adviser, are immigration hard-liners and are major proponents of the kind of “legislative framework” that earlier in the day Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said the administration would release on Monday that would be intended to emphasize conservative demands for tougher immigration enforcement and border protection. Neither Mr. Kelly nor Mr. Miller accompanied the president to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Within hours, Mr. Trump’s off-the-cuff comments to reporters seemed, again, to suggest flexibility. But his remarks sent the White House staff scrambling in what one official called a “fire drill.” After delaying the briefing for nearly an hour, Mr. Trump’s aides decided to postpone it until Thursday as they tried to reconcile their plans with the president’s words.
Mr. Trump, once again, said he will insist on an end to the diversity lottery system, which encourages immigration from a variety of countries. Mr. Trump referred to the program as a “broken system” that brings the wrong kind of people into the United States. He said that he wanted to negotiate an end to so-called chain migration, but said he would work to allow nuclear families to stay together.
Despite the president’s pledge to the Dreamers, his administration cracked down earlier Wednesday on so-called sanctuary cities. The Justice Department asked the asked 23 jurisdictions across the country to furnish documents proving that they had not kept information from federal immigration authorities. The department’s move caused several Democratic mayors from some of the country’s largest cities to boycott a White House meeting with Mr. Trump.
“Protecting criminal aliens from federal immigration authorities defies common sense and undermines the rule of law,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement. “Enough is enough.”
The protest against the letter and Mr. Sessions’s comments added a local dimension to the roiling national debate. Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans and the president of the United States Conference of Mayors, said on Wednesday at a news conference in Washington that he saw the Justice Department’s move as an “attack,” and that he could not “in good conscience” attend the White House meeting.
Sanctuary cities, which generally refuse to hold people on immigration agents’ behalf without a warrant from a judge, have pushed back hard over the past year on the administration’s attempts to force them to abandon their stance by cutting off federal funding to them. Some, like Chicago, have filed lawsuits against the Justice Department.
“President Trump shouldn’t invite us to the White House for a meeting on infrastructure and three hours before issue the equivalent of what are arrest warrants for standing up for what we believe in and, by the way, what America believes in,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago said.
Mr. Sessions has taken a hard line on the issue since his days as an Alabama senator. Since Mr. Trump took office, both men have focused on sanctuary cities, accusing such places of flouting the law and helping convicted criminals evade deportation.
Armed with the news that several Democratic mayors had declined an invitation to the White House, Mr. Trump again returned to a partisan stance on immigration.
“The mayors who choose to boycott this event have put the needs of criminal, illegal immigrants over law-abiding America,” Mr. Trump said at the event, held hours before he dropped in on reporters.
As the president ended his conversation with reporters and prepared to leave for Switzerland, he jokingly suggested that he would like a deal on immigration in place by the time he returns.
Mr. Trump is scheduled to arrive back at the White House on Friday night.
Katie Benner and Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on January 25, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Open To Citizenship For ‘Dreamers’.