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US President Donald Trump finally signed on Friday the budget bill passed by Congress this morning, despite his threats to veto it for not containing enough funds for the wall with Mexico or a solution for undocumented youth known as "dreamers". EFE / Jim Lo Scalzo
US President Donald Trump finally signed on Friday the budget bill passed by Congress this morning, despite his threats to veto it for not containing enough funds for the wall with Mexico or a solution for undocumented youth known as "dreamers". EFE /…

The Congress settles and forgets the Dreamers

The Senate approved Friday the government's spending bill, authorizing a package of 1.3 trillion dollars. Despite his threats, President Trump has agreed to…

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If someone wondered why the slowness and delay of Congress to reach an agreement on the spending bill, here is your answer.

As Politico explained, "presidential budgets are always dead on arrival on Capitol Hill, but (this) omnibus (a single spending bill that finances almost all government functions) feels more like a product of Obama-era divided government than Trump-era Republican monopoly.”

And, to the surprise of some, legislators finally agreed and the Democrats won, although at a very high price for immigrants.

On Friday afternoon, President Trump turned to Twitter to report that he considered resorting to the veto to block the bill because, "800,000 plus DACA recipients have been totally abandoned by the Democrats," something with which, for the first time, we can agree.

Perhaps for the president, the reasons are not precisely the abandonment of DACA, but the fact that the bill does not eliminate any of the programs or agencies that Trump longed to finalize, protects some priorities of the Obama era and even expands them.

As Politico continues, Congress increased the funding for Department of Energy’s renewables by 14%; will not cut funding for sanctuary cities, eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Legal Services Corporation.

On the other hand, and while the White House gets 1.6 billion for border security, "the bill specifies it cannot be spent on the concrete wall that the president wants."

The law won’t cut Pell grants for low-income students or funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the National Institutes of Health either.

In summary, the financing project that Trump introduced through his budget chief Mick Mulvaney, was not satisfied practically at all.

"Trump has periodically threatened to shut down the government if Democrats wouldn’t meet his demands," explains Politico. "But Republican leaders were clearly desperate for the Democratic votes they needed to keep the government open."

To the point that the new bill doesn’t even cut funding for programs like Planned Parenthood, something that measures the extent to which Republicans were willing to go in order to get the votes.

And seeing that much of their wishes were granted, Democrats forgot their struggle with the undocumented young immigrants and overlooked the struggle to recover the program that protected them.

For Representative Luis V. Gutiérrez, member of the House Judiciary Committee, "immigrants and Latinos got run over by the Omnibus and we have nothing in return," he wrote in a statement.

For its part, the Hispanic Caucus of Congress (CHC), represented by its chairwoman Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, issued a statement saying it does not support the new bill because, "by not including a permanent fix for Dreamers in the omnibus, the President and Republicans have prolonged this self-inflicted crisis and have left the Dreamers in limbo and at the mercy of a temporary court injunction."

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