Trump clears up his immigration position: A border wall must be part of any DACA deal

Show Caption Hide Caption Donald Trump outlines 4 areas of immigration reform A border wall is still a must-have.

WASHINGTON — President Trump said it again Wednesday, but this time in no uncertain terms: There must a border wall as part of any legislation to extend temporary legal status for immigrants who arrived in the United States as children.

"It's got to include the wall. We need the wall for security. We need the wall for safety. We need the wall for stopping the flow of drugs coming in," Trump said at a news conference Wednesday. "Any solution has to include the wall, because without the wall, it all doesn’t work."

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Trump's promise to build a wall along the Mexican border was a central tenet of his campaign for president. But he thrust that commitment into doubt briefly on Tuesday when he appeared to suggest — during an extraordinary public negotiation with members of Congress at the White House — that he would deal with the so-called DREAMers first and come back to the wall later.

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Trump later clarified that protections for DREAMers, the children of immigrants who remained in the country illegally, must be connected to funding the border wall.

Adding to the confusion: The initial White House transcript of his talks with members of Congress had originally omitted his answer to a proposal from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., for a "clean DACA bill."

On Wednesday, the White House also released a corrected transcript with Trump's answer: "I would like to do that."

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Lawmakers are under a March 5 deadline — imposed by Trump — to come up with a legal fix to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Despite Trump’s mixed messages during Tuesday's meeting, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle started negotiations Wednesday with a narrowed focus of what needed to be included, with three other issues on the table.

They are: Additional border security, the end of the diversity visa lottery program and family-based "chain migration." In exchange, there would be some form of legal protections for the so-called DREAMers who came to the U.S. illegally as children.

Senators from both parties met behind closed doors Wednesday to work out details, buoyed by Trump's support for the concept. “I think the president took a very positive approach to this and I was pleasantly surprised," said Senate Minority Whip Richard Durbin, D-Ill.

But House Republicans want to go further than the Senate framework. The Securing America’s Future Act, introduced Wednesday, includes a lengthy list of border and internal enforcement provisions, a crackdown on so-called "sanctuary cities" and a reduction of overall immigration levels by 25%. In exchange, the bill would offer three-year renewable legal status for DACA recipients.

“This is the only bill that will get the majority of the conference and I think we can get to 218 Republicans to vote for it,” said Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, a member of the hard-line Freedom Caucus and a co-sponsor of the bill. That's important because it would allow the House to pass the bill with only Republican votes. However, GOP leadership has not said whether they will bring the bill to a vote.

But even if it makes it through the House, the bill’s chances are slim in the Senate where they’ll need 60 votes to pass legislation. Republicans have a 51-49 majority and many of the bill’s provisions are non-starters for Democrats.