Luis Gutiérrez: Trump DACA Proposals Part of ‘White Supremacist Agenda’

Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL) called President Donald Trump’s new proposals for legalizing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program “an extension of the white supremacist agenda” on Sunday.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Gutiérrez said, “I warned Democrats not to negotiate.” He said that Trump “has never wavered from his xenophobic positions” and added that “what they want to do is criminalize and delegitimize Latinos.”

The proposals, obtained Sunday evening by Politico, are being called “hard-line” by mainstream media observers. Though none of them is framed as a veto threat, they represent conservative positions that skeptics of DACA have insisted ought to be part of any deal to provide legal status to those brought to the U.S. illegally.

Some of the key points are: “complete construction of the border wall”; “prompt removal” of illegal alien minors who have crossed the border in large numbers recent years, but who have been released into the U.S. afterwards; tightening requirements for asylum in the U.S.; and speeding through the court backlog of immigration cases.

An analysis of Trump’s proposals Sunday evening by the Los Angeles Times concluded that they “could kill prospects for a deal.” The president ended the DACA policy in September but delayed the enforcement of his decision by six months, providing a window for Congress to pass legislation to legalize the program. He has suggested that he would act if Congress could not, though he has not been clear about what, exactly, that would mean.

Gutiérrez would prefer a “clean” passage of the so-called “DREAM Act,” which would offer pathways to citizenship for those brought to the country illegally as children. In his 2013 memoir, Gutierrez wrote that President Barack Obama had claimed DACA was illegal before he enacted it.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.