President Donald Trump proposed a plan to offer three years of protection for DREAMers and people holding temporary protected status (TPS) visas in exchange for border wall funding from Democrats, as part of a new bid on Saturday to end the partial government shutdown, which is now the longest on record.

"I am here today to break the logjam and provide Congress with a path forward to end the government shutdown," said Trump in a 13-minute address from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House.

But even before Trump announced his plan on Saturday, the plan was labeled a nonstarter by Democrats.

Trump announced he was offering three years of protections for some 700,000 current recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, who had come to the US as children, "in order to build the trust and goodwill necessary to begin real immigration reform [with Democrats]."

Since coming to power, Trump has pushed hard to end DACA protections introduced by former president Barack Obama, which allowed undocumented people who came to the US as children, known as DREAMers, the right to be protected from deportation. Trump declared in September 2017 that he was rescinding DACA, a decision that was temporarily blocked by a federal court last November. The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to review the case.



Trump also offered three years of protections on Saturday to TPS visa holders: immigrants who've been allowed to work and live in the US freely because of dangerous or unsafe conditions in their home countries. There are currently 300,000 TPS holders in the United States.

However, the Trump administration is taking TPS status away from citizens of El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Haiti, and is in legal battles to remove TPS from citizens of other countries.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will bring the bill to a vote this week, although McConnell had previously said he would only bring a vote to the floor if it had the support of both Republican and Democrat leaders.



"Everyone has made their point — now it’s time to make a law," said McConnell in a statement.

The move by the president to use legal protections for DREAMers and TPS holders as a bargaining chip is a bid to convince Democrats to support funding for his wall on the southern border with Mexico — something the party has strongly opposed. Trump said Saturday that the wall he now envisaged was not a single structure. "This is not a 2,000-mile concrete structure from sea to sea. These are steel barriers in high-priority locations," said the president.