The administration is not negotiating over a ‘DACA’ amnesty but is seeking a security deal, the secretary of homeland security told Fox News today.

“It is not a DACA deal,” Kirstjen Nielsen told Fox News’ s Chris Wallace. “It’s a security immigration deal … to ensure that we don’t end up here again” with a population of illegal immigrants.

Nielsen’s focus on security — not the amnesty part of the immigration negotiations — follows the Democrats’ sudden pivot to smearing President Trump as a racist following his rejection of their amnesty legislation in closed-door negotiations on January 11.

Fronted by establishment Sen. Lindsey Graham, Democrats tried to persuade Trump to continue large-scale cheap-labor immigration via chain-immigration from countries with low economic performance, which he reportedly dismissed with crude language.

After Trump’s sharp rejection of their low-ball offer, Democrats publicized those negotiation-table comments in the hope of pressuring Trump to concede. Their revelation successfully set off a media-magnified scandal that portrays Trump as a racist before the November election and also obscures Trump’s defense of Americans’ wages and economic growth.

The Democrats’ proposed amnesty pitch to Trump offered minimal changes in the chain-migration laws and even included an expanded amnesty to include millions of illegal-immigrant parents who brought their children into the United States.

Nielsen’s new security-not-amnesty comment matches Trump’s emphasis on merit immigration and also emphasizes Trump’s political distance from the Democrats’ insistence on “diversity” immigration, or the immigration of Democratic-leaning unskilled migrants from Africa, South Asia, and South America.

I, as President, want people coming into our Country who are going to help us become strong and great again, people coming in through a system based on MERIT. No more Lotteries! #AMERICA FIRST — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 14, 2018

The new security language is a sharp turnabout from Trump’s televised January 9 event, when he urged House judiciary chairman to develop a “bill of love.”

Currently, the United States has a population of 12 million illegal immigration, including roughly 3.25 million people aged 15 to 40+ who were brought into the country as children by their illegal immigrant parents.

In numerous events, Trump has said he will OK an amnesty — likely with citizenship — for some of the 3.25 million younger ‘dreamer’ illegals, including the 670,000 DACA illegals, providing the Democrats agree to fund the border wall, cancel the visa lottery program and end the chain migration of extended-family members.

In her Fox News interview, Nielsen downplayed the amnesty but stressed the need for legal reform. The reforms are needed to make sure that migrants cannot use legal loopholes to walk through the border wall, she said, adding:

We must close these [legal] loopholes to ensure that these temporary populations not only are not encouraged to take the dangerous journey to get there, but then when they get there, we are able to promptly remove them so we don’t end up with the category of DACA again … The problem is that we have so many loopholes within our legal system based on a panoply of court decisions, confusion with respect to the laws and how we can enforce them that if you are in the South or Central America, those who would wish to smuggle you are able to tell you if you get to America you can stay. So, more and more are willing to undertake the journey because there is no way for me to promptly remove them. So, we talk about the wall, the wall is a very, very important part of this. It works, but it only gets us partway there because if I can stop them at the border but I can’t remove them, that’s not border security. And they will continue to come. WALLACE: So, what some people are saying is the reason it’s going back up is because for all the tough talk from the president, people in Central America, smugglers and people wanting to come across, they finally decided the system really hasn’t changed. NIELSEN: The system is worse. Every time a court makes a patchwork decision based on one individual, we continue to exacerbate the systemic failure of the system. My troops (ph) cannot remove those that they apprehend, whether they are criminals in some cases or whether there are multiple repeat illegal entry. We have to change these loopholes so that we can promptly remove them.

Nielsen also decried the Democrats’ threat to block 2018 funding for the federal government until the GOP OKs an amnesty.

NIELSEN: … In terms of the funding, what I would say is in my opinion where I sit it’s completely responsible to tie the two together. We need to fund our troops, we need to protect them, we need to increase homeland security. These are vital national security interest we need to fund. To tie them into a DACA deal or the actual expiration date is in March is irresponsible. WALLACE: So, if the Democrats insist on linkage and the government shuts down, that’s on them? NIELSEN: Well, it would be very unfortunate if they continue to do that. They are not the same conversation. I think you heard Democratic leaders say just that in the past.

Polls show that Trump’s American-first immigration policy is very popular.

For example, a December poll of likely 2018 voters shows two-to-one voter support for Trump’s pro-American immigration policies, and a lopsided four-to-one opposition against the cheap-labor, mass-immigration, economic policy pushed by bipartisan establishment-backed D.C. interest-groups.

Business groups and Democrats tout the misleading, industry-funded “Nation of Immigrants” polls which pressure Americans to say they welcome migrants, including the roughly 670,000 ‘DACA’ illegals and the roughly 3.25 million ‘dreamer’ illegals.