US President Donald Trump and the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, have once again clashed over Trump’s immigration proposal.
On Thursday, the White House unveiled details of the immigration plan that would allow 1.8 million people to become US citizens in exchange for $25 billion in funding for a wall along US-Mexico border.
The 1.8 million immigrants are those who are covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and those people who are eligible for DACA but did not apply.
On Friday, Schumer said he was happy that Trump had announced his immigration goals, but dismissed the president’s proposal as a “wish list” for hardliners.
In a pair of tweets, he expressed satisfaction that the president “finally acknowledged that the Dreamers should be allowed to stay here and become citizens.”
However, he said the plan “uses them as a tool to tear apart our legal immigration system and adopt the wish list that anti-immigration hardliners have advocated for for years.”
In response, Trump tweeted back, accusing Schumer of making the process complicated.
“DACA has been made increasingly difficult by the fact that Cryin’ Chuck Schumer took such a beating over the shutdown that he is unable to act on immigration!” he wrote.
This comes after Trump Tuesday night repeated his warning that there would be no deal to help young undocumented immigrants without funding for his long-promised wall.
Schumer, earlier in the day, had confirmed that the offer to discuss funding for the project had been taken back due to what he said was the president’s failure to follow through on the outlines of an agreement discussed last week.
The two had reportedly discussed a $31 billion package to pay for security measures along the southern border, much larger than the amount Trump had told lawmakers he would need to fulfill his signature campaign pledge.
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