President Trump said Wednesday that he was considering a pathway to citizenship of “10 or 12 years” for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals beneficiaries, though the details have not been finalized, in a proposal that would offer legal status to the affected young illegal immigrants in exchange for other reforms.
Trump also expressed openness to extending the DACA deadline past March 5, when the program offering deportation protections to undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors is set to end at his direction, if lawmakers haven’t acted by then.
“Yeah, I might do that,” Trump said during a meeting with reporters at the White House when asked about extending the March 5 deadline. “I’m not guaranteeing it… I certainly have the right to do that, if I want.”
Trump reiterated his commitment to reforming family-based immigration and ending the diversity visa lottery ahead of announcing a DACA proposal next week.
"We're gonna create a standard... so that not everybody you ever met can come into the country," Trump said of chain migration. "But you'll have wives and husbands and you'll have sons and daughters."
Throughout the process, the White House has supported limiting family reunification to spouses and minor children.
"We'll talk about parents," the president added. "Dealing with the parents is a tricky situation because they came here illegally."
Trump repeated his opposition to the visa lottery. "The lottery system is a broken system," he said. "They put people in a lottery. They're not putting their finest in that system."
A senior administration official said that the proposed pathway to citizenship for "Dreamers" is a "discussion point" and they were focusing on the 690,000 DACA enrollees rather than a larger population of potential beneficiaries.
The official said White House chief of staff John Kelly would go to the Capitol to deal with immigration rather than traveling to Davos, making clear concerning the plan by Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and others that "their version of solving this problem is not the president's version of solving this problem."
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters at Wednesday's briefing that the administration will release a "legislative framework" for immigration on Monday.
"This framework will fulfill the four agreed-upon pillars: securing the border and closing legal loopholes; ending extended-family chain migration; cancelling the visa lottery; and providing a permanent solution on DACA," Sanders said. "After decades of inaction by Congress, it’s time we work together to solve this issue once and for all. The American people deserve no less."
DACA was created by President Barack Obama after Congress' failure to pass the DREAM Act, a move that some criticized as an improper use of executive power. Trump announced the end of the program in September but gave lawmakers until March to provide a legislative solution for its beneficiaries.
Democrats have pushed for a solution ahead of that deadline, since some beneficiaries have already begun losing their protections. The federal government was partially shut down over this impasse and reopened after Democrats extracted a promise of a DACA vote.
"We're going to treat people very well," Trump said Wednesday evening, "and we're going to solve a problem that it a very tough problem to solve."
