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Photo: EFE/EPA/Ron Sachs
Photo: EFE/EPA/Ron Sachs

"Border Security, DACA, TPS and everything you want, but give me the wall"

In a desperate effort, Trump offers a pact to the Democrats that would put in a single bag all the immigration proposals that have been debated in recent years…

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"Reasonable", "common sense", "a compromise;” these were the words of President Donald Trump last Saturday when describing his last and desperate attempt to reach an agreement with the Democrats in exchange for his coveted border wall with Mexico.

After having closed the government for a record of 30 days, the U.S. president has resorted to a maneuver deeply rejected by his followers and has offered a greedy solution to Democrats in Congress to address the serious political and administrative stalemate in the country.

In a televised speech, the president offered "three years of deportation protections for some immigrants in exchange for $ 5.7 billion in border wall funding,” according to the Washington Post.

This would include a temporary suspension of his efforts to eliminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, known as DACA, and the Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from some Latin American and African countries, two of his few "achievements" in his anti-immigrant agenda of recent years.

The immediate response of the Democratic leadership in Congress was to completely refute the proposal, saying “it’s a non-starter” according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Predictably, Trump didn’t take the rejection well and called the representative "irrational" and "a radical democrat", again asserting that Democratic intransigence was only a strategy for 2020, "that they won’t win."

However, this new failure in the negotiations seems to play against both sides.

For the President’s base, his offer is interpreted as a betrayal of his electoral promises, and many have called it "an amnesty.”

According to James Carafano, a member of the conservative Heritage Foundation, "including amnesty in the new proposal is not the way to (secure the border)," ABC News reported.

For their part, both Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats in Congress have maintained a strong stance against the government's attempts to negotiate with anything at hand in order to build the border wall.

But their promise before the inauguration of the new Congress had been to "pass legislation that grants the so-called Dreamers a path to citizenship," as the representative well stated last December.

While yielding to the temptation of Trump's new proposal could achieve something similar, the political price could be very high.

On the contrary, both Pelosi and minority leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, have decided to close flanks and work in an indivisible duo to face the pressure from the White House, while trying to approve measures that temporarily open the government, and only then proceeding with the discussion of proposals with the president.

In one way or another, the Democratic strategy seems to be having an effect because, in other circumstances, it would have seemed impossible for Trump to even consider giving in to an immigration issue.

Moreover, the pressure in the middle of the Republican Party has put its leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, in the difficult situation of designing a proposal that includes the migratory provisions of the president, the reopening of the government, emergency funds for areas affected by disasters, and even an extension of the Violence Against Women Act, according to the Post.

And is that, in order to obtain another symbolic victory, the Republicans - and therefore, the president - are able to even consider some progressive ideas.

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