WASHINGTON
— The White House on Sunday demanded that lawmakers harden the border
against thousands of children fleeing violence in Central America before
President Trump will agree to any deal with Democrats that allows the
young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers to stay in the United
States legally.
Administration
officials said that Mr. Trump would seek to slam shut what they
described as loopholes that encouraged parents from Guatemala, El
Salvador and Honduras to send their children illegally into the United
States, where many of them melt into American communities and become
undocumented immigrants.
The
demand is included in a list of legislative priorities for tougher
immigration enforcement that Mr. Trump and his advisers released on
Sunday as they seek to establish their bargaining position in expected
congressional negotiations later this year about the Dreamers, who were
brought to the United States as small children and often have few ties
to the countries of their birth.
Last
month, the president abruptly ended an Obama-era policy called Deferred
Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, in which former President
Barack Obama had used his executive authority to protect about 800,000
of the young immigrants from the threat of deportation and provide them
legal work permits. If a deal is not reached by March, tens of thousands
of the Dreamers will begin losing permission to work and protection
from deportation.
In
addition to a crackdown on unaccompanied children at the border, the
document released on Sunday insisted that any deal to give the Dreamers a
permanent legal status must include the construction of a wall across
the southern border, aggressive efforts to crack down on illegal
immigrants by deporting people who have stayed beyond the limits of
their visas, and legislation to reduce legal immigration by creating a
system that approves immigrants based on their skills, not their family
connections.
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Taken
together, the proposals amount to a wish list for immigration
hard-liners inside the White House, including Stephen Miller, the
president’s top policy adviser, who has long advocated extremely
aggressive efforts to prevent illegal entry into the country and crack
down on undocumented immigrants already here.
The
White House immigration priorities — which will be delivered to Capitol
Hill in the coming week — have the potential to scuttle the effort by
Mr. Trump and Democrats to reach an agreement on protecting the
Dreamers. Immigration activists have long opposed many of the White
House proposals as draconian or even racist, and they would most likely
urge Democratic leaders to refuse a deal that included them.
Democratic
leaders in Congress reacted with alarm, saying the demands threatened
to undermine the president’s own statements in which he pledged to work
across the aisle to protect the Dreamers through legislation.
“The
administration can’t be serious about compromise or helping the
Dreamers if they begin with a list that is anathema to the Dreamers, to
the immigrant community and to the vast majority of Americans,” Senator
Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, and Representative
Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, said in a joint
statement.
Mr.
Schumer and Ms. Pelosi, who declared last month that they had reached a
deal with Mr. Trump to protect Dreamers, denounced the president’s
demands as failing to “represent any attempt at compromise.”
“If the president was serious about protecting the Dreamers, his staff has not made a good-faith effort to do so,” they added.
But
immigration rights advocates are also under pressure to do something
for the Dreamers, and privately, many advocates have acknowledged that a
negotiated deal with the Republican president is likely to include some
increases in security at the border and other immigration changes.
The
possibility of a deal emerged shortly after the president ended the
DACA program early last month. But even as Mr. Trump kept his campaign
promise to halt what he had described as “one of the most
unconstitutional actions ever undertaken by a president,” he quickly
added that he would work with Democrats in Congress to replace the
executive policy with legislation.
“The
president’s position has been that he’s called on Congress to come up
with a permanent solution and a fix to this process,” Sarah Sanders, the
White House press secretary, said last week of the effort to help
Dreamers.
It
is unclear whether Mr. Trump views Sunday’s list of immigration demands
as absolute requirements for an agreement or the beginning of a
negotiation.
But
conservatives in Mr. Trump’s administration, many of whom were
advocates of his hard-line immigration rhetoric during the 2016
campaign, are clearly maneuvering to ensure that any deal on the
Dreamers also results in passage of the tough immigration enforcement
measures and border security enhancements that they have been seeking in
Congress for decades.
A
key part of the administration’s demands is the insistence that
something be done about tens of thousands of children who have surged
across the border with Mexico during the past several years, many of
them seeking to escape gang-related violence in Central American
countries. In 2014, about 60,000 children crossed the border without
their parents.
Administration
officials say the children — many of whom are sent by their parents to
live with a cousin, aunt, uncle or sibling who is already living in the
United States — must be turned back or quickly deported once they
arrive. Under current law, many of them remain in the United States for
years during legal proceedings to evaluate their asylum or refugee
claims.
If
the children are not deported quickly, officials say, many will never
leave, eventually becoming a new population of sympathetic young
immigrants who seek amnesty to live and work in the United States
legally. That could create a never-ending cycle in which illegal
immigrants demand to be given a legal status, the officials say.
They
argue that allowing the children to stay in the United States simply
encourages more to make the journey, believing — accurately in many
cases — that they will not be returned home.
The
document released on Sunday endorsed specific ideas to accomplish the
president’s goals: It called for new rules that say children are not
considered “unaccompanied” at the border if they have a parent or
guardian somewhere in the United States. Officials also proposed
treating children from Central America the same way they do children
from Mexico, who can be repatriated more quickly, with fewer rights to
hearings.
Mr.
Trump also called in the document for a surge in resources to pay for
immigration judges and lawyers and more detention space so that children
arriving at the border can be held, processed and quickly returned if
they do not qualify to stay longer.
Critics
say the focus on deporting unaccompanied children is heartless and
impractical. They say many of the children were sent by their parents on
long, dangerous treks across Mexico in the hopes of avoiding poverty,
hunger, abuse or death by gangs in their home countries.
A
court settlement and a bipartisan anti-trafficking federal law passed
in 2008 give the children certain rights when they arrive and require
the government to give immigrant children a court hearing to determine
the validity of the dangers they are said to face at home. But a
shortage of judges and other resources has created a yearslong backlog
in those cases. In the meantime, most are eventually relocated to family
members or foster homes in the United States while they await their
hearings.
Groups
that advocate on behalf of the children trying to cross the border say
that many of them are not represented by lawyers as they seek to prove
in court that their lives and welfare would be threatened if they
returned home. Those who do have lawyers are often granted the right to
stay permanently in the United States, and eventually apply for
citizenship.
Advocates
acknowledge that more resources are necessary to speed up those
hearings. But they argue that White House efforts to demand quick
decisions are likely to merely result in many children being sent back
to places where they are raped, beaten or killed.
Sending
the children back with just a cursory hearing is “a recipe for disaster
in terms of returning people to danger,” said Wendy Young, the
president of Kids in Need of Defense, a group that aids young refugees.
Democrats
and immigration activists are certain to assail the White House
proposal on dealing with Central American children as something they
cannot support and little more than a thinly veiled effort to scuttle
negotiations between the president and the Democrats even before they
begin.
“Promoting
the protection of one group of young people at the expense of another
is absolutely unacceptable and a nonstarter,” Ms. Young said in a
statement.
Some
activists have been pressing Democratic leaders not to make any
concessions to Republicans. They are urging passage of a “clean” bill
that would protect the young immigrants without accepting any new
enforcement of immigration laws.
That
appears unlikely to win support in the Republican-controlled Congress.
But the White House call for an immigration crackdown could also split
the Republican Party, where a handful of lawmakers are pushing for a
compromise that would include only modest increases in immigration
enforcement at the border in exchange for protecting the Dreamers.
Senator
Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, on Thursday proposed legislation
that would protect the immigrants in exchange for much less aggressive
enforcement efforts: $1.6 billion in funding for border security
measures and new efforts to crack down on members of gangs like MS-13
for deportation.
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