The after action report is that the session was mainly a showcase for Donald Trump to pat himself on the back for being tough on immigration….
Initial reports that the admin was looking for a consensus on possible compromise was thrown in the garbage ….
Trump made sure to let everyone at the Monday get together that HE dictated policy….Not his trusty assistant Stephen Miller or even his son -in-law Jared Kushner…
The plan advanced is simply a wishlist….
From reports there absolutely NO way most the things on that list would pass in the majority Democratic US House…
(The White House is ordering officials to be more confrontational against asylum seekers and court has just backed up the admin policy of sending those seeking asylum back across the border to Mexico to await their hearings…The admin has admitted it has no means to reunite families they separated at the border now and in the past even though judges have ordered them stop and reunite the families ).
The fact is?
Donalds Trump has and will continue to run on seeking to stop immigration of brown people at the US Southern Border….
He will continue to go after legal immigration into America…
He feels it will keep his white centric base behind him as America continues to move towards a non-white majority in a few decades…
Tuesday started with talk of White House officials preparing to lay out a centrist immigration plan born from Jared Kushner’s monthslong efforts to bridge wide divides between Republicans and Democrats. But it ended with the administration tepidly pointing only to a “potential plan” with scant details.
And White House officials were unable to clearly explain just why many — if any — House and Senate Democrats would support a plan that they said was received warmly by a group of conservative GOP senators.
“I think [President Donald Trump] was very happy with the meeting today. I think we got a very positive reaction from a lot of people whose opinions … he wanted to seek,” a senior administration official told reporters Tuesday evening.
“And I think it was a good step forward to validate a lot of his instincts on what he wanted to produce,” the official said.
But Trump’s instincts on immigration routinely revert back to the kinds of hard-line stances espoused by Stephen Miller, one of his chief domestic policy advisers, who was an aide to former Attorney General Jeff Sessions when the Alabama Republican served in the Senate.
Asked if the president wants to gather a group of Democrats around a White House conference table and seek their opinions on what’s needed to address immigration matters, the senior official demurred.
“You’re jumping a bunch of steps ahead and today was one step in the process,” the official told CQ Roll Call. “We’ve had a lot of steps you [reporters] don’t know about. And we’ll have more steps that you probably won’t know about. And probably we’ll have steps you will know about,” the official added, advising a reporter to “relax.”
Devil in the details
But relaxed journalists do not translate to Democratic votes the White House will need in the House and Senate to get an immigration bill to Trump’s desk. What the senior official described Tuesday evening did not include a proposed temporary or permanent fix for the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that Trump froze and a federal court has allowed to continue while litigation is ongoing.
Top Democrats have long said that any immigration overhaul they support would have to address that program….