White House chief of staff John Kelly stressed to reporters that DACA permit holders would not be a priority for deportation. | John Shinkle/POLITICO Kelly doubts Trump will extend Dreamers deadline The White House chief of staff said the president was unlikely to give Congress more time to come up with a fix for young undocumented immigrants.

White House chief of staff John Kelly on Tuesday cast major doubt on the prospect that President Donald Trump would extend a March 5 deadline for Congress to protect Dreamers — even as lawmakers remain split over the fate of the young undocumented immigrants.

That deadline has been murky since the Trump administration has again been taking renewals under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program following a federal court order in early January. That ruling is under appeal, but a final decision isn’t likely until summer.


Kelly also said he would not support Trump asking Congress for a short-term, perhaps yearlong, DACA extension to buy more time to come up with a deal on Dreamers — an idea that lawmakers have discussed as an absolute last resort. Kelly nonetheless cautioned that Trump would have the final call.

“I would certainly advise against it. I would advise against it. I’m not the president,” Kelly said as he left a meeting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “But any time you give this institution time, they’ll take it.”

As for extending the deadline unilaterally, which Trump had hinted at in the past, Kelly said "I doubt very much" that the president can do so because the program was created by President Barack Obama in a way that the current administration believes is against the law.

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“Mr. Obama established the program, and it was considered to be unconstitutional, not based on any law,” Kelly said. “So the extension, I’m not so sure the president, this president, has the authority to extend it.”

The chief of staff's remarks, made in an impromptu conversation with three journalists on Capitol Hill, came as lawmakers struggle to coalesce around a plan that would stave off the threat of deportation for hundreds of thousands of young immigrants protected under the Obama-era initiative.

The administration has sent Congress a framework of a possible Dreamers deal that includes a dramatic revision of current legal immigration laws, especially family-based migration policy. Democrats have largely resisted the plan because of those restrictions, even as some conservative Republicans oppose it as too liberal toward undocumented immigrants.

A growing group of senators is trying to come up with its own plan, while the No. 2 congressional leaders have also been working, somewhat futilely, toward an agreement. The administration has panned bipartisan proposals from the latest "Gang of Six" senators, as well as a separate bare-bones plan from Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.).

And on Tuesday, Kelly repeatedly defended the White House plan as "generous," particularly the provisions that expanded the universe of Dreamers eligible for a pathway to citizenship from the estimated 690,000 current DACA recipients to 1.8 million young undocumented immigrants who came here as minors.

That expansion covers immigrants who some say "were too afraid to sign up, others would say were too lazy to get off their asses" to register for the program, Kelly said during the 18-minute discussion with reporters.

"I can’t imagine men and women of goodwill who have begged this president to solve the problem of DACA, and as generous as [his] four pillars has been, I can’t imagine they would vote against it," Kelly said of lawmakers on Capitol Hill. "I mean, this is more than they could’ve imagined."

In a full-throated defense of the president, Kelly added: "I would offer that if before the champions of DACA were members on one side of the aisle, I would say right now, the champion of all people that are DACA is Donald Trump. But you’d never write that."

Later, in a private meeting with the No. 2 congressional leaders, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) "took exception" to Kelly's earlier characterization that some may have not applied for DACA because they were "lazy," according to Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). Hoyer declined to comment on the exchange.

Durbin and Cornyn left the late-afternoon meeting touting some progress, yet Durbin cautioned that the sides were far from an agreement: "We have a long way to go, but the conversation today was positive."

McConnell has pledged a freewheeling floor battle on immigration should top congressional leaders fall short of striking a deal for Dreamers that Trump will sign into law. Kelly made clear the administration wants to see its framework as the starting point for debate, if not the final product.

In addition to dumping the diversity visa lottery and overhauling family migration laws, Trump's "four pillars" also includes a massive investment in border security — including a wall — as well as the pathway to citizenship for qualifying Dreamers.

"The expectation would be that would be turned into a bill and then you know, then the Congress does what the Congress does and does the best they can to come up with it," Kelly said. Those pillars, the chief of staff said, "are fundamentally what he would sign."

But McConnell told reporters later Tuesday that “there’s no secret plan” on immigration, instead encouraging senators working on the topic to put their proposals in writing and ready them for a vote. He said he would not dictate an outcome, but he said he’d “rather deal with this issue” than delay it further.

“In the Senate on those rare occasions when we have these kind of votes and debates, whoever gets 60 wins. It’ll be an opportunity for 1,000 flowers to bloom,” McConnell said. “The Senate is going to work its will. My hope is we end up passing something.”

The changes to family-based migration — which would bar U.S. citizens from sponsoring parents, siblings and adult children for green cards in the future — have drawn the most fire, particularly from Democratic lawmakers.

But Kelly defended those so-called chain migration provisions and said that was as far as the administration was willing to go in negotiating changes to family-based migration policy. The proposal is sufficiently generous, Kelly argued, because the administration will continue to process the estimated 4 million people who have applied to be admitted into the United States through family sponsorship yet are waiting because of a significant backlog in available visas.

"Again, no one gets hurt in the family provisions because anyone that's in the pipeline, as they say, continues in," Kelly said. The chief of staff also called it a "misconception" that the administration's framework slashes legal immigration, despite some outside analyses that show otherwise.

If family members can't be sponsored in the future for green cards, Kelly noted that "your family can still come visit you or you can still go back to wherever you're from originally and visit your family."

"It’s just that the movement away from the family or the chain migration is consistent with the needs of the nation today in terms of what immigrants come in, what their backgrounds are," Kelly said. "And I don’t mean race or religion. I mean their education level, I mean their ability to immediately contribute to U.S. society."

Despite the fluidity of the March 5 deadline, some DACA recipients whose permits expire soon after that date could be left vulnerable since renewals can take several months to process. Yet Kelly stressed to reporters on Capitol Hill that DACA permit holders would not be prioritized by immigration enforcement officials to be removed from the United States.

"They are not a priority for deportation," Kelly said of people who hold valid DACA benefits. "If you are an illegal alien in this country, you're obeying the law, you are not a target for priority."

Burgess Everett and Ted Hesson contributed to this report.