For much of his presidency, Donald Trump promised he’d treat Dreamers “with heart,” showing an unusual level of sympathy for someone whose hard-line immigration stance was the hallmark of his campaign.

"I have a love for these people," Trump said in September.


But now, Dreamers are getting dragged into the toxic politics of the government shutdown. Republicans are sharpening their rhetoric against the Dreamers, pitting them against other popular priorities such as keeping a children’s health care program solvent and funding the military.

Trump’s political arm released an ad accusing top Democrats of siding with the “interests of illegal immigrants over Americans” — a point top White House officials, including the president himself, made throughout the first day of the shutdown.

"Democrats are far more concerned with Illegal Immigrants than they are with our great Military or Safety at our dangerous Southern Border," Trump tweeted on Saturday.

“We will not negotiate the status of 690,000 unlawful immigrants while hundreds of millions of taxpaying Americans, including hundreds of thousands of our troops in uniform and border agents protecting our country are held hostage by Senate Democrats,” added White House legislative director Marc Short, though those Dreamers can work legally and they, too, pay taxes.

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The increasingly heated rhetoric, not to mention the general morass of shutdown politics, is prompting some people concerned with the plight of Dreamers to privately question whether this battle will ultimately hurt the cause of winning them permanent protection from deportation.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a veteran of the immigration wars who favors comprehensive reform, was also surprised that the cause of Dreamers had prompted such a partisan battle. Flake and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) spent much of Saturday cloistered with Senate leaders and other rank-and-file senators, trying to carve out a path not only to reopen the government but also somehow to move a deal to enshrine the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals program, or DACA.

Flake recalled that in previous immigration negotiations, finding legal status for Dreamers was always the easier part of the discussions, and that piece was used to help move other, more controversial changes to immigration laws.

“This is a sympathetic group. We knew it could move on its own,” Flake said. “Now on its own, it’s the reason we’re shutting down the government.”

Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the top negotiator on immigration for Senate Democrats, said that for now, he wasn’t concerned that the ugly shutdown battle would end up hurting the prospects of a bipartisan immigration deal.

“But the sooner we get beyond this, the better,” Durbin added. “The longer it goes, the worse it gets.”

There are tangible consequences of a protracted shutdown when it comes to negotiations. For one, the White House has flatly refused to negotiate on immigration while the federal government’s doors are closed.

The primary team tapped with brokering an immigration deal — the No. 2 leaders in each chamber, along with top administration officials — hasn’t met since a Friday morning session that the Democratic whips did not attend.

At that Friday meeting, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) stressed that there would be no reason for the leaders to continue the discussion as long as Democrats threatened to reject bills that would stave off a government shutdown, according to a source familiar with the conversation.

“Now that they have, I don’t expect it to get rescheduled until they reopen the government,” the person said.

It's baffling to many on Capitol Hill that a broadly popular initiative such as protecting Dreamers could trigger a shutdown. A CNN poll released Friday showed the DACA program is almost universally popular: 84 percent of those surveyed said they would like to see it continue.

“It’s clear to me the Democratic Party’s willing to do something on DACA. What’s equally clear to me is that an overwhelming number of Republicans will be fair to the DACA population,” said Graham. “Which just blows my mind. As Mitch [McConnell] said, how could this happen? How could you take an 80 percent issue and screw it up?”

The popularity of the DACA program, however, changes when tied to the shutdown.

The CNN poll also found that 56 percent of voters said averting a shutdown was more important than continuing the DACA program, while 34 percent favored DACA. Democrats and advocates were dismissive of the poll’s findings, arguing that it set up a false choice when both outcomes were simultaneously plausible.

Some advocates believe the administration’s scorched-earth rhetorical campaign against Dreamers won't do much damage in the long run.

“Are Dreamers going to be somehow less popular? That number has gradually gone up over the last five, 10 years,” one advocate said. “Even if you lost 20 percent of Republicans, you’d lose 4-5 percent with the public.”

Before agreeing to any stopgap funding of more than a few days, Democrats are insisting on a path forward for an immigration deal through both chambers of Congress. Advocates say there is no path unless an immigration fix is tied to a must-pass bill like a spending measure.

That’s a nonstarter for Republicans. But for advocates, the showdown is worth it.

“We were being slow walked to death,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of the immigration advocacy group America’s Voice. “The Republican strategy, the McConnell-[Paul] Ryan strategy, was to isolate the DACA fix [from] the spending negotiations so that it would be delayed and derailed.”