WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump bitterly attacked top Democrat Nancy Pelosi on Sunday after she rejected a deal on immigration and the Mexico border wall that would end a 30-day-old government shutdown.
Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, on Saturday called Trump’s offer of temporary protections for about a million immigrants in return for $5.7 billion to fund the wall a “non-starter.”
“Nancy Pelosi has behaved so irrationally & has gone so far to the left that she has now officially become a Radical Democrat,” Trump tweeted. “She is so petrified of the ‘lefties’ in her party that she has lost control.”
“…And by the way, clean up the streets in San Francisco, they are disgusting!” he added, in a seemingly gratuitous aside. Pelosi is from San Francisco.
The offer also was assailed by prominent anti-immigrant voices, which denounced it as tantamount to amnesty.
“No, Amnesty is not a part of my offer. It is a 3 year extension of DACA,” Trump said in another tweet, referring to former president Barack Obama’s programme to shield undocumented immigrants who entered the country as children.
Besides the 700,000 immigrants already enrolled in the so-called DACA or “Dreamers” programme, Trump’s proposal would also extend to another 300,000 people who had been protected from deportation under another programme.
He said that while there would be “no big push” to remove the 11 million people in the country illegally, he warned: ‘but be careful, Nancy!”
Vice President Mike Pence, who has been leading the administration’s contacts with members of Congress, said a bill with the president’s proposal would be introduced in the Republican-controlled Senate as early as Tuesday.
Trump did not make clear what he was referring to regarding the 11 million people mentioned in his tweet. About 12 million people are living in the United States illegally, according to US Department of Homeland Security estimates.
About one-quarter of the US government shut down on December 22 over Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion to fund a wall along the border with Mexico, which Democrats have refused to consider. Some 800,000 federal workers have been ordered to stay home or work without pay during the shutdown.
On Sunday, a day after Trump’s DACA proposal, there appeared to be signs of movement, even as Democrats insisted the government should reopen before proceeding with talks over border security.
“What the president proposed yesterday — increasing border security, looking at TPS, looking at the Dreamers — I’ll use that as a starting point. But you’ve got to start by reopening the government,” US Senator Mark Warner said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Temporary Protected Status (TPS) refers to another class of immigrants — nationals from designated countries affected by armed conflict, natural disaster, or other strife. — AFP
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