After striking a conciliatory tone on immigration reform in a meeting with lawmakers Tuesday, President Trump returned to tougher line on Wednesday, insisting that any legislation reinstating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program must also include funding for a border wall.
“It’s got to include the wall,” Trump said at a news conference with the prime minister of Norway. “Any solution has to include the wall because without a wall it doesn’t work.”
That was a hardening from Trump’s comments a day prior, when he told a group of lawmakers from both parties and both houses that he would sign almost any bill they agreed to pass. “I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, gee, I want this or I want that.’ I’ll be signing it, because I have a lot of confidence in the people in this room that they’re going to come up with something really good,” Trump said on Tuesday as the press listened. At one point during the meeting, he said he would be for “comprehensive immigration reform.”
A source with knowledge of the closed-door session of that meeting Tuesday confirms the White House statement noting the parties agree to negotiate a bill incorporating border security (i.e. some form of wall), ending chain migration, ending the visa lottery program, and fixing the DACA program. The president’s open-ended promise to sign onto any bill, in other words, wasn’t as broad as it may have seemed in front of the TV cameras.
The House Judiciary committee chairman Bob Goodlatte released on Wednesday a new bill to address these concerns. Here’s CBS News on the bill:
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07.03.2025