Calling President Stephen Miller’s white supremacist wish list of immigration principles “a complete non-starter,” Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi said she intends “to use every possibility” to reach an agreement to protect undocumented immigrant youth, including withholding Democratic support for a spending bill:
“We’re not at that place yet,” she added, per the Post. “Right now, we’re trying to get Republicans to vote on what we believe.”
The White House on Sunday announced a list of demands for any deal restoring some protections for DACA recipients that could tank a potential deal. The Trump administration demanded that any agreement include funding for the border wall, curb legal immigration, and limit the relatives that immigrants can bring to the U.S.
The list of hard-line immigration demands runs against the supposed tentative deal that President Donald Trump reached with Democratic leaders. Pelosi told the Washington Post that she still believes Trump wants to protect DACA recipients, but that his staff proposed a list of demands that could threaten a DACA deal.
“I do believe the president when he says he wants to protect the Dreamers,” Pelosi said. “I do not think what his staff put forward is in furtherance of that. In fact, it’s endangering them.” We can thank the ghoulish Miller for that, who has a racist history that dates back to his middle school days, when he unfriended a Latino classmate just because he was Latino.
The fact is the American people overwhelmingly back immigrant youth, not Miller, with nearly 90 percent saying that undocumented immigrant youth should be put on a path to legal status so that they can stay in the only country they’ve ever known as home. And if there’s anyone who can whip up the votes to support immigrant youth and pass the bipartisan DREAM Act—without Miller’s ideas—it’s Pelosi.