President Donald Trump on Friday said he has “tremendous support” from Republicans to make a compromise on a path to citizenship for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, despite backlash from his far-right base.
During an interview with CNBC Friday, Trump said the Republican senators he’s been courting on immigration reform — Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR), David Perdue (R-GA), John Cornyn (R-TX) and Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) — are “willing to shift more” on their stance on protecting DACA recipients if it means Trump will get his border wall.
NBC and The Daily Beast reported Thursday that the White House’s platform on immigration — which will be revealed Monday — will offer a decade-long path to citizenship for 1.8 million DACA recipients in exchange for $25 billion in border wall and security funding, which Trump said will be more than enough to cover construction.
“I don’t need $25 billion to build a wall,” he said. “We’ll build a great— that’s what I do. We’ll build a great wall and we’ll have a lot of money left over and we’ll spend it on other things.”
The White House also plans to propose the termination of the diversity visa lottery program and family-based immigration. The news of Trump’s planned compromise sparked outrage from pundits on the far-right, with Breitbart News even bringing back to it’s “amnesty Don” headline for the President.
Despite the backlash, Trump said he thinks he can get the Republicans, as well as Democrats, to agree to a compromise because he will “consider it a great achievement to solve the DACA problem.”
“I think Cotton, and Perdue, and Goodlatte, and the people that I’ve been dealing with — Cornyn, so many of the people — these are great people,” he told CNBC. “These are people that really have shifted a lot. They’ve really shifted a lot, and I think they’re willing to shift more, and so am I.”
Watch the interview below:
Watch CNBC’s full interview with President Trump from Davos from CNBC.
