ON AUGUST 24, 2017, Elaine Duke, the acting DHS secretary, arrived at the White House for a meeting of the Domestic Policy Council, where she had been summoned to discuss the way forward on the DACA program. A career civil servant who had worked in the Bush and Obama administrations and was widely respected in the department, Duke was a procurement and acquisition expert who had been chosen to serve in the top echelons of DHS primarily to deal with the wall and operational issues. She wore her long brown hair loose and tucked behind an ear, and had an earthy way about her, with a wide smile and a gentle demeanor. Duke was the furthest thing imaginable from a political operator. She was not a Trump loyalist and not one for the public spotlight, and she had never expected to tackle high-profile decisions with giant political ramifications—certainly nothing as controversial and emotionally charged as the fate of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants. She was utterly unprepared for the lion’s den she was about to enter.
When Duke arrived in the Roosevelt Room that day, it was clear that she had misjudged the situation entirely. This was not a routine meeting to discuss policy options; it was something of a procedural ambush. Miller and Sessions came into the room determined to drive a stake through the heart of the DACA program, but they needed her to acquiesce in order to carry out the plan.
As Duke sat at the large, wooden table opposite the twentieth-century bronze sculpture of a bison holding off a trio of menacing wolves, Miller and Sessions laid out the situation. The president wanted to end DACA, they said, and Duke was going to be the one to issue a memo killing it. The attorney general reiterated what he had said publicly about the program being illegal and unconstitutional. Even Obama had created it only reluctantly, after initially having said that he could not do so because he was not “king.” Don McGahn, the White House counsel, was there to back up the legal arguments, saying that given the attorney general’s conclusion that the program was unconstitutional, the Trump administration would look “foolish” if they tried to defend it. Hamilton and several other DHS officials piled on as well, siding with Miller and Sessions.
Duke was surprised and taken aback. During her stints outside of government, Duke volunteered at Hogar Immigrant Services in Virginia, an organization led by Catholic Charities, tutoring immigrants on civic education and American history to help them pass their citizenship tests. She wanted to follow the law, but she also wanted to do the right thing. She was deeply resistant to the idea of putting hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants at risk of deportation, and effectively telling them that the country they considered their own did not return the sentiment.
From the start, Duke had known that Trump’s most important advisers wanted to end DACA. And she shared their view that the program was problematic and probably illegal. She was aware of the threat of a lawsuit from the Republican attorneys general, and of Sessions’s position that the program was legally indefensible. Lawyers at DHS and the Justice Department liked to say that they couldn’t find a single lawyer who thought the program was legal. Hamilton and other DHS officials had advised her that the department could not continue issuing permits for a program that the Justice Department considered unconstitutional. It had to go, they told her. But there had to be a way to salvage some measure of protection for this one group of immigrants, Duke thought. She had spent hours huddling with her staff in the days before this meeting, discussing the fate of the program.
But in the Roosevelt Room that day, Miller and everyone else around the table was acting like this was a done deal. As far as they were concerned, DHS was already on board, and here Duke was, acting like this was still a live discussion. It was like she was on a different planet, the others thought, going on and on about what alternatives there were to ending DACA, when the reality was that there was no alternative. Duke became defensive. She was not about to be bullied into something she wasn’t sure was the right thing. You can’t tell me what to do, she said. She may not have been nominated by the president or confirmed by Congress, but she was the acting secretary, and she was not going to be rushed or intimidated into making this decision. Kelly, still bent on punting the issue to Capitol Hill, raised the issue of potentially delaying the end of the program with a six-month grace period, both to avoid an abrupt termination and to pressure lawmakers with a date-certain by which they needed to act if they wanted to preserve the protections. But some officials said the program should be gone immediately. If we are saying it’s unconstitutional and illegal, they argued, how can we continue to administer it? The session ended with no resolution.
Miller had conveniently scheduled the meeting when one key player was missing; Kushner had been out of town. Once he got back, he set to work trying to slow the process. Maybe there’s a more gradual way to do things, Kushner argued. It doesn’t have to be here today, gone tomorrow. Kushner’s intervention threw more sand in the gears that Miller and Sessions had put in motion. About a week later, officials gathered in the Roosevelt Room again for another DACA meeting, this one billed as the forum for a final decision to be reached. But as they sat and waited for the session to begin, one of Kelly’s aides entered and told everyone it was off.
With scarcely more than a week to go before the deadline set by the attorneys general, DACA proponents on Capitol Hill and in Washington’s powerful lobbying circles were staging a last-ditch rescue mission for the program. Speaker Ryan called Kelly to beg him to reconsider. “Please don’t do this,” Ryan told Kelly. “It will derail tax reform, and we can’t afford to have that happen.” Kirstjen Nielsen, Kelly’s deputy when he was DHS secretary, had just gone over to join him in the same role at the White House, and several leaders of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce organized a dinner to introduce her to some of the capital’s most influential business lobbyists. At the dinner, they delivered the same message about DACA. You are creating an artificial deadline in the middle of tax reform, and it is going to blow up in your face, said members of the group, which included Neil Bradley, the Chamber’s executive vice president, as well as Brett Loper, the top lobbyist for American Express, and Marc Lampkin, the managing partner of one of the district’s top lobbying firms. We could end up in a shutdown over immigration, with tax cuts as the collateral damage. They discussed Republicans’ failed efforts to repeal Obamacare and explained that the president and the party badly needed to put some accomplishments on the board. “Don’t roll this hand grenade into the middle of tax reform,” Bradley implored Nielsen. But she did not appear to understand the power of the White House to chart a course on a controversial issue. If the administration doesn’t act, she said, the state attorneys general will sue and do it for us, she insisted. Well, then you should convince them to delay, the group replied. Yet Nielsen also appeared to have great confidence in Kelly’s idea for a six-month wind-down. An artificial deadline would give Trump leverage to get the wall in exchange for legislation extending DACA protections. It would be a slam dunk, she said. The lobbyists were incredulous. You think this is a great issue, they told Nielsen. Actually, it’s a terrible issue politically. The White House, they concluded, had absolutely no idea what the termination of DACA was about to unleash.
Inside the West Wing, Trump was still conflicted, and DACA supporters secretly hoped they could appeal to him to preserve the program. On the Friday before Labor Day, with only days before the legal deadline and speculation rampant about the president’s intentions, Ryan tried one last tactic to get Trump to back down. In an interview with WCLO, his hometown radio station in Janesville, Wisconsin, Ryan said that the president should not terminate DACA. “I actually don’t think he should do that,” Ryan told the station. “I believe that this is something that Congress has to fix.” The White House was incensed. Trump still had to make the decision, and he seemed to change his mind by the hour about what he wanted to do. Exasperated, the president kept demanding that his aides find him “a way out of this.” Trump reluctantly told advisers that he would accept Kelly’s idea, ending DACA with a six-month delay that would put pressure on Congress to save it or let it die. But he felt torn, trapped, and unsatisfied with the decision.
Duke had quietly agonized, too. She did not want to terminate DACA, but she knew there was no avoiding it given the inclinations of Trump and his team. She was deeply disappointed that the Dreamers would only have six months of protections, counting it as a personal failure that she hadn’t been able to buy them more time. And there were limits to what Duke was willing to do to help the White House accomplish something she viewed as inhumane. She would issue the memo rescinding the DACA program, but she refused to sign on to the policy reasons Miller and Sessions were pushing for doing so. There would be no mention of the claim that the program encouraged illegal entry and disrupted the normal, legal channels for immigrating to the United States. In other words, no policy rationale would be given for ending the program. Duke would simply refer to prior court decisions and Sessions’s assertion that it was unconstitutional. Nor did she want to be the public face of announcing DACA’s demise. Sessions stepped up to do so instead. Duke would later tell people that she was grateful to Sessions for agreeing to be the face of the DACA decision, saying he was “good to me” on an issue that tore her up inside.
By Sunday of a frenzied Labor Day holiday weekend, Ryan received a call at his home in Janesville from Kelly, who was phoning to tell him that Trump would soon announce that he was terminating DACA with a six-month delay, to give Congress time to act on legislation that would address the Dreamers’ situation. Ryan was disappointed but resigned to the outcome, and hopeful that the move might actually spark a new phase of legislative negotiations in what had, up until then, been directionless behind-the-scenes talks about what would become of DACA. Ryan only had one request, one that his staff had shared with Marc Short, Trump’s legislative chief, a few days before: if Trump is going to do this, he needs to make an on-camera announcement, personally calling on members of Congress to act to codify the program’s protections. It would put the presidential imprimatur on the idea of legalizing the Dreamers, and give Republican lawmakers the political cover they needed to embrace a measure that was certain to be condemned as “amnesty” by their core supporters. That was the plan as of noon on Labor Day, when White House officials told Ryan’s office that Trump and Sessions planned to announce the termination the following day.
But in the Oval Office, Trump was still hesitating. He detested the press coverage of his impending decision, which painted him as conflicted and portrayed ending DACA as a coldhearted, shortsighted move. In general, Trump relished his reputation as a tough guy who was willing to hit back at his opponents and insult his critics, but he could not stand the thought of being seen as mean to defenseless kids. Neither could he tolerate the idea of backing down from a promise he had made his supporters, particularly on immigration, the issue that defined his brand. In the dining room off the Oval Office where he passed much of his time watching television and reading news clips, the president spent his Labor Day huddling with Miller and Hope Hicks, his director of strategic communications, making edit after tortured edit to his brief remarks.
Like a student with a particularly ominous homework deadline looming, Trump felt trapped by the September 5 deadline, much as Bannon and Kobach had intended. The “way out” that his advisers had offered him—ending the program, but not doing so right away—was a middle ground that somewhat softened the blow of taking away protections from hundreds of thousands of young immigrants with promising futures, but it was also in some ways the worst of all worlds. Trump would get some credit from his hard-core base for terminating the program but be criticized by many on the right for failing to switch it off immediately. And advocates of the Dreamers, including the immigrants themselves, would be outraged that he was wiping away the protections—despite the brief delay—and thereby opening hundreds of thousands of people once again to deportation. Instead of the kind of black-versus-white, good-versus-evil message that Trump liked to deliver, he was having to prepare a nuanced statement he feared would please no one, least of all himself.
“As president, my highest duty is to defend the American people and the Constitution of the United States of America,” Trump’s statement began. “At the same time, I do not favor punishing children, most of whom are now adults, for the actions of their parents. But we must also recognize that we are a nation of opportunity because we are a nation of laws.” On the one hand, on the other hand. Forget it, Trump finally decided. He wasn’t going to make any remarks at all. Let Sessions do it. He would put out a written statement instead. At nine that evening, Ryan’s office got the call: the attorney general will be announcing this tomorrow, not Trump. By now, the speaker had become accustomed to the fact that Trump was not a president who understood or cared much about giving his Republican brethren any political cover. But he was still annoyed by the last-minute change, and fearful of what it portended. If Trump wasn’t willing to speak about the DACA termination publicly, would he be willing to step up and use his influence to help lawmakers cut a deal to fix the problem he was creating? Or would Republican lawmakers be left holding the bag for a decision the president had made unilaterally?
In his written statement, Trump called DACA an “amnesty-first” approach and emphasized that he felt sympathy for those it was designed to protect, but argued that the program was illegal and misguided. He laid out the complicated consequences for those currently protected under the program—their permits would not begin to expire for six months, and some would last as long as two years—and said they would not be targeted for deportation unless they were criminals. “I am not going to just cut DACA off, but rather provide a window of opportunity for Congress to finally act,” Trump said. But he also made it clear that that opportunity would not come for free. In the eleventh paragraph of the tortured, sixteen-paragraph statement, the president laid out his priorities for immigration reform. “Before we ask what is fair to illegal immigrants, we must also ask what is fair to American families, students, taxpayers, and jobseekers,” he said. That meant overhauling the nation’s green card system and building a skills-based immigration process, he said. These were the kinds of changes Miller and the serious immigration restrictionists saw as enduring and crucial.
The threat of a lawsuit from the states opposed to DACA had vanished when Trump ended the program, but now he faced legal challenges from the other side. Within days, immigrant rights advocates launched a legal assault on Trump’s decision to end DACA. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit in New York the day after Trump’s announcement. Janet Napolitano, the president of the University of California, who as Obama’s first DHS secretary created the DACA program, filed suit on behalf of the California colleges two days later. The NAACP sued, too. The challenges were not unexpected; Miller and Sessions knew they were coming. But inside the White House, they added to Trump’s deepening anger about judges and the courts. Trump was also right about the political reaction; there was little praise for his decision from hard-core restrictionists, but plenty of outrage from Democrats and advocates of the Dreamers. The day after the announcement, Representative Luis Gutiérrez of Chicago lashed out at Kelly, calling him a “hypocrite who is a disgrace to the uniform he used to wear. He has no honor and should be drummed out of the White House along with the white supremacists and those enabling the president’s actions by ‘just following orders.’ ” The criticism was especially stinging for a Marine general who had lost his son in Afghanistan seven years before. Gutiérrez had been unaware that Kelly was a Gold Star father, and when the chief of staff arrived in the Capitol later that afternoon for a closed-door meeting with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the congressman apologized, saying his comment had been inappropriate and he should never have allowed his criticism to become personal. Kelly was gracious, shaking Gutiérrez’s hand and telling the congressman, “Apology accepted.” But his visit left a bitter taste anyway.
In a roomful of lawmakers who were immigrants themselves or had parents who were, Kelly said Trump did not want people to come to the United States poor and unable to support themselves or their families; he wanted well-educated immigrants, able to speak English and contribute to society. The lawmakers held their tongues, but many were offended and worried. If this is what the White House chief of staff really thinks of immigrants—really thinks of us—they wondered, what will become of the Dreamers?
“What’s in it for me?” Trump wanted to know.
It was a week after his decision to end the DACA program, and the president had invited Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic congressional leaders, to dinner in the oval Blue Room of the White House, with the lit-up obelisk of the Washington Monument visible out the window in the distance.
Trump was in deal-making mode that night. He had ordered up a Chinese-themed meal from the White House chef—crispy honey sesame beef and sticky rice—as a nod to Schumer’s fondness for the cuisine as well as their shared hard-line views on China. The pie for dessert was chocolate, a Pelosi favorite. He had seated himself at the head of a rectangular wooden table between the two leaders he had recently dubbed “Chuck and Nancy,” a chummy moniker that had for the moment taken the place of “Cryin’ Chuck,” the president’s go-to Twitter insult of the Senate minority leader. After a discussion of trade issues and China, Schumer steered the conversation to DACA. Trump had ended the program and was calling on Congress to act, and Democrats had a proposal, the senator said. If Trump would support the Dream Act, which would permanently protect undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, Schumer said, Democrats would be willing to negotiate with him over a package of strong border security measures—although they would not embrace his call for a wall on the border with Mexico. The president seemed intrigued, as much for what the deal would mean for him as for how it might help the hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients whose fate he had just placed at risk.
Schumer, a schmoozer by nature who sensed an opening, had a ready answer for Trump’s question. The president had spent the summer alienating people both at home and abroad, he said. He thumbed his nose at America’s allies with his decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord, then sparked outrage with remarks after the racial unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia, that seemed to condone white supremacy and neo-Nazism. Now was his chance, Schumer said, to prove that he could do more than just divide people. Now was the time for Trump to show that he could be the dealmaker he always claimed to be. The president, never one to hold his tongue when criticized, took in the senator’s argument, even chuckling at one point.
But at the other end of the table, his aides were panicking, fearful that Trump was about to give away the store. When the president called on Kelly to weigh in, the chief of staff rose from his seat to make an impassioned argument for fortifying the border, including with stronger barriers. He said that Mexico was descending into crime and chaos, almost as bad as Venezuela under Hugo Chávez. Such a collapse on the southern border could be devastating to the United States, Kelly said, and Congress needed to step up aggressively to address the threat. Marc Short, the White House legislative chief, warned Trump about what the Democrats were actually suggesting. Let’s just slow down for a second, he cautioned. You know they’re talking about the Dream Act here? Unlike DACA, which granted temporary permits to about 800,000 people but did not give permanent legal residency or citizenship, the Dream Act would cover at least a million more—some estimates put the total at well over three million—and ultimately allow its beneficiaries to become American citizens. Trump gestured vaguely with one hand, as if to brush off Short’s concern, and urged the Democrats to keep talking. Wilbur Ross, the seventy-nine-year-old secretary of commerce, repeated the president’s initial question: What does he get out of this? Pelosi tried to answer, only to have her voice drowned out by others at the table, all men. “Do the women get to talk around here?” she said wryly, drawing nervous laughter and then silence. What Trump would get, she said once the room had fallen quiet, was the cooperation of Democrats to achieve other elements of his agenda, which he would no doubt need in the months and years to come.
Dinner ended on a positive note. Not only were they willing to work together to cut the deal that Trump had discussed with the Democrats, but they had agreed that each side would put out a statement reflecting a shared desire to craft legislation that would give Dreamers a pathway to citizenship, and at the same time hammer out a deal on border security measures. Trump had one request for the wording of the statements: he did not want anyone to use the term “Dreamers,” he said. Native-born Americans have dreams, too, Trump said, and he didn’t like the impression that the DACA population would be getting special treatment. Ever the salesman, Trump thought it would be better for marketing purposes to use the program’s acronym, DACA. His Democratic guests agreed to the condition.
But sensing that they had outmaneuvered Trump, Pelosi and Schumer were not about to allow the aftermath of the dinner to unfold entirely on his terms. Minutes after they left the White House, the Democrats—well aware of Trump’s penchant for changing his mind and going back on his word—issued a brief joint statement calling the dinner “very productive” and making clear that the president had endorsed the idea of legislation that would pair help for the Dreamers with border security, but leave out the wall. “We agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a package of border security, excluding the wall, that’s acceptable to both sides,” their statement said.
The reaction from Trump’s base was as swift as it was bitter. “AMNESTY DON” blared the headline on Breitbart, coining a phrase that quickly went viral in the conservative Twittersphere. “TRUMP CAVES ON DACA.” Miller was frustrated and angry, feeling partially responsible for allowing Trump—always thin on the specifics, ever in search of a deal—to stray so far, in essence undercutting his own negotiating position in the coming talks over DACA and making it more difficult for Republicans to find a workable middle ground. Ryan had advised Trump in a call earlier in the day that he should aim for a DACA-for-wall deal, not the all-out Dream Act Democrats were demanding or the other restrictions that Miller was hoping to tack on. With a few plates of sesame beef, that plan seemed to have evaporated.
Trump had been outhustled by Chuck and Nancy, and he knew it. But the president still did not seem to comprehend how to salvage his leverage. In private conversations, Trump told senior Republican lawmakers that he would not insist that a wall be in the DACA bill, but he would insist on having it funded eventually. The president did not understand that if he was going to have a crack at securing his wall, the DACA legislation was the only way to do it. The morning after the dinner, it fell to Ryan to help Trump save face. On Capitol Hill, the speaker held a news conference to try to clean up the mess. Trump hadn’t agreed to anything, Ryan said, and any bill that he would accept would have to include border security. “These were discussions, not negotiations,” Ryan said. “There isn’t an agreement. And it’s very clear—and I want to make this clear over and over again—if we don’t fix the problems we have with border security and enforcement, and we would only fix DACA, we’re going to have another DACA problem a decade from now. That’s the symptom of the problem, so let’s fix both.”
Ryan dispatched Casey Higgins, his top immigration aide, to begin private talks with Miller about what a potential deal might look like. But the distrust on both sides was profound. As a congressional staffer, Miller used to routinely savage Ryan as an open-borders enthusiast and amnesty apologist. He would feed unflattering information about Ryan to reporters at Breitbart and other hard-right outlets, and then blast out the resulting stories to an email distribution list that went to scores of congressional offices. (Despite repeated entreaties, Ryan’s staff could never get Miller to include them on his immigration news clips list.) One such article was the wall exposé from Ryan’s front yard in Janesville by Julia Hahn, who now worked alongside Miller at the White House. For Miller, the prospect of collaborating with Ryan’s staff on a compromise was risky, given the speaker’s long-established enthusiasm for a business-minded immigration overhaul. But the path to an eventual bill that could clear Congress and land on the president’s desk ran through his office. So the odd coupling commenced.
Ryan also put together a Republican working group to try to build consensus on what that would look like. It drew from all over the spectrum, from leaders Ryan and Kevin McCarthy, the No. 2 in the House, who had developed a rapport with Trump; to hard-liners like Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, the Judiciary Committee chairman; Raúl Labrador of Idaho and Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin; to more moderate voices including Mike McCaul, the Homeland Security Committee chairman; Martha McSally of Arizona; as well as Will Hurd of Texas and Mario Diaz-Balart, both of whom had been at the forefront of trying to forge bipartisan immigration deals in the past. But the group could hardly agree on anything, and without clear guidance from the White House about what the president would or would not accept, their efforts floundered. The messages from the White House about the elements of a DACA deal were mixed at best. One day, the RAISE Act—which slashed legal immigration by up to 50 percent—seemed to be the priority; the next, it was ending chain migration. Trump kept inviting different groups of lawmakers to the White House, seeming to cast about for possible solutions.
As he tried to figure out the contours of a deal, Miller stayed in close touch with the Freedom Caucus, the ultraconservative group that had forged a tight alliance with Trump and was deeply hostile to Ryan, speaking almost daily and sometimes more with its chairman, Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina. Miller began developing a draft of immigration principles that would put the focus back on enforcement, restrictions, and reducing the number of people admitted to the United States, where he believed it belonged. Miller told colleagues that he was increasingly convinced that the idea of ending chain migration was the key to any agreement, both because it would make enduring changes to the existing immigration system and because it “polls through the roof.” In other words, it would put Democrats in a tricky political position, forcing them to explain to the public why awarding green cards based merely on family ties was better than doing so based on skills and accomplishments.
But Miller was also convinced that this was his chance—maybe his last—to win all sorts of immigration concessions in return for addressing the fate of the Dreamers. So he enlisted the Department of Homeland Security to help draw up an elaborate wish list. One Saturday evening in October, Duke frantically summoned her senior staff to an office at the Reagan Building. “Right now, I need a list of everything we could trade for DACA,” a distraught Duke told them. It was clear she had been upbraided by the White House and was desperate to deliver as big an ask as she could put together in exchange for protecting the Dreamers. The resulting four-page list would serve as the raw material for a lengthy menu of immigration demands Trump would issue the following week, each of which he said “must be included” in any DACA deal. “It was terrible government,” said an official involved at the time. “It was just a list of every single thing that everyone around the table wanted that could be immigration-related. And we just threw it together.”
The Tuesday after Duke’s frenzied brainstorming session, Ryan’s immigration working group gathered in the small Ways and Means Committee room on the first floor of the Capitol for a briefing on the laundry list, which was chock-full of measures that Democrats—and even some Republicans—regarded as poison pills with the potential to kill any DACA deal. It included the wall and more money for border enforcement, but also cuts to legal immigration, which Ryan had made clear he opposed, and dozens of other proposals meant to block migrants from entering the United States. New restrictions would make it easier to remove unaccompanied children who arrived at the border and make it more difficult for people to claim asylum. The country would accept fewer refugees fleeing war and persecution. The immigration system would be based on skills, rather than family ties, and the diversity visa lottery eliminated. Lawmakers wanted to ask practical questions about what the administration needed to make the immigration system workable, but Francis Cissna of USCIS spent much of his time hammering on the idea of ending chain migration, repeatedly making the political case for basing immigration priority on employment skills, rather than family members whose relatives happen to reside in the United States. Miller took a hard line as well, making it clear to lawmakers that the White House was going to insist on all of these measures as part of any DACA deal. Their rhetoric grew heated as they previewed what the public case would be for Trump’s position. As lawmakers peppered Miller with questions about how a proposal like this could possibly ever make it through the Senate—even if it could pass the House—Miller seemed to have no answers.
Only Duke appeared to acknowledge the political realities. She conceded that some of the measures Trump was demanding were politically difficult and potentially unachievable. While the wall was the top item on Trump’s list, when lawmakers pressed her on it, Duke would not say the wall or even border fencing was a top priority; while DHS had identified some areas where it was needed, she said, the bigger gap was in technology, an item that had been omitted from the document altogether. Ron Vitiello of Customs and Border Protection said he shared that assessment.
But even as Miller pressed for a wide-ranging immigration measure full of new restrictions, Trump was musing about a far different plan. During a Columbus Day golf game at the president’s club in Sterling, Virginia, Lindsey Graham chatted up Trump about the same sort of deal he had been discussing with Kushner months earlier: legalize the Dreamers and give their parents work permits in exchange for strong border security measures, including a wall component. In a nod to the goal of limiting chain migration, Graham proposed barring Dreamers from sponsoring the parents who brought them to the United States illegally. And they would do away with the diversity visa lottery, which Trump viewed as the most egregious aspect of an immigration system that seemed to allow people in almost at random.
Trump seemed intrigued. I want to fix this, he told Graham, and I’m willing to sit down with Democrats and get it done. They met again for golf the following Saturday. “He wants to make a deal,” the South Carolina Republican told The New York Times a few weeks later. The senator said that Trump was even entertaining the idea of a second phase of immigration changes after DACA had been dealt with, in which he would grant legal status to the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants—those who were not felons. But Graham wasn’t the only one trying to get Trump to endorse an ambitious plan.
For weeks, as a year-end deadline loomed to reach a deal on federal spending, groups of Republicans would make pilgrimages to the White House to try to get the president’s stamp of approval for their wildly divergent immigration ideas. They thought they were racing against a clock; Democrats had said that legislation to address the plight of the Dreamers should be part of any year-end spending legislation, raising the specter of a government shutdown to cap off Trump’s first year in office if no agreement could be reached. But they could not get a clear read from the White House. Trump was desperate to get his wall, but Miller was instead fixated on broader immigration changes. At a meeting at the White House, Miller told the heads of the leading immigration restrictionist groups that if they were ever going to win his main goal and theirs—making major cuts to the number of immigrants allowed into the United States—an amnesty for the Dreamers was the only way to do it. They’re not going anywhere anyway, Miller acknowledged. And this is the only chance we’re going to have to cut legal immigration. If we don’t do it now, who will? He implored the anti-immigration leaders not to oppose the idea.
Pressure was beginning to mount in Republican ranks to address the issue. Just after Thanksgiving, Mark Amodei, a four-term congressman and the only Republican in Nevada’s House delegation, became the first in his party to sign on to an insurgent effort to force a vote on legislation to protect the Dreamers. The so-called “discharge petition” was an arcane but potentially potent parliamentary tactic that would essentially compel Ryan to schedule action on a DACA bill if a majority of the House—218 members—signed on. Thirty-four House Republicans signed a letter to Ryan calling for such a measure. With his working group in shambles, the speaker was increasingly worried that more of his members would take the same position as Carlos Curbelo of Florida, another contrarian Republican lawmaker, had: that they would not vote for any more spending bills until there was a deal to save DACA.
But Democrats were not going to force a shutdown over the Dreamers—at least not yet. In late December, Schumer decided he would allow a stopgap spending measure without a fix for DACA to pass, thus punting the issue to January and averting a shutdown. Rank-and-file Democrats were furious, and members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus gathered off the House floor and marched across the Capitol to Schumer’s office to demand an audience with him. During a tense meeting in the Senate Democratic leader’s suite, Gutiérrez unloaded on Schumer, accusing him and other Democratic senators of ignoring the plight of the Dreamers and “throwing them under the bus.” The argument got heated, as Schumer chided Gutiérrez for speaking ill of members of his own party. But in the end, when Republicans muscled a month-long spending bill through the House, Senate Democrats refrained from trying to block it. Privately, Democratic leaders explained their rationale for forgoing a year-end fight with Trump over DACA. They simply did not want to be blamed for a government shutdown.