The "common-sense coalition" of senators that helped end the federal government shutdown will meet this week to consider President Donald Trump's immigration proposal and make recommendations, Sen. Susan Collins said.
Collins of Maine, a moderate Republican who's emerged as the leader of a bipartisan group of 26 senators, said the goal is to find a way to help young illegal immigrants, known as Dreamers, who were brought to the U.S. as children, and to beef up security on the southern U.S. border as Trump is demanding.
"All of us realize that it's going to take a compromise on this issue for us to get something done," Collins said Sunday on CNN's State of the Union. The group plans to make recommendations to the leaders on the Senate Judiciary Committee's border security and immigration subcommittee, Republican John Cornyn of Texas and Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois. "I hope we can find a way forward," Collins said.
Trump's plan would offer deportation protection and a pathway to citizenship for as many as 1.8 million people under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA. In exchange, the White House wants $25 billion for construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall and for additional border and port security, and other actions on immigration.
[U.S. immigration: Data visualization of selectedimmigration statistics, U.S. border map]
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, also speaking on CNN, said the senators would meet today to seek common ground, working off Trump's template.
"The president's laid out what he wants, that's a good starting point," Manchin said. "Let's see if it's something that we can agree on."
Both Manchin and Collins said that additional border security is needed, though Collins said that doesn't mean a physical wall across the entire southern border. Some people won't agree with that, just as some won't agree to a path for citizenship for the Dreamers, she said.
The president weighed in on immigration in two late-night tweets Saturday, saying he has offered a "wonderful" deal because Republicans want to fix the problem and "to show that Democrats do not want to solve DACA, only use it!"
"Democrats are not interested in Border Safety & Security or in the funding and rebuilding of our Military," Trump said on Twitter. "They are only interested in Obstruction!"
The president also wants to limit a program that gives preferential status to the families of U.S. citizens and immigrants, and eliminate the visa lottery program.
The administration needs the ability to promptly stop people at the border and prevent companies that "consistently and persistently violate our laws" by hiring illegal aliens, Kirstjen Nielsen, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in an interview from Davos, Switzerland, that aired Sunday on Fox News Channel's Sunday Morning Futures.
She cited 7-Eleven as an example, after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on the convenience stores earlier this month.
Marc Short, the White House legislative affairs director, said on Fox News Sunday that approving wall funding and other parts of the Trump's proposal would prevent future clashes over the young illegal immigrants -- making them worthwhile trade-offs for offering a pathway to citizenship, which many conservatives decry.
"I think conservatives recognize the benefit to really securing our border and helping to fix these long-term problems," Short said. "I think we're going to get widespread support on our side."
Short said that Trump's administration is "anxious to solve the problem," and that House and Senate Democratic leaders were using the issue "to play politics."
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Trump made a credible offer and that he's optimistic a deal can be struck that avoids another government shutdown -- if the president continues with the attitude he's expressed in his proposal, and Democrats overcome their reluctance to work with him.
"Take a deep breath, we can get there," Graham said Sunday on ABC's This Week.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer believed cutting a deal with Trump was his best chance to protect the Dreamers, until the government shutdown last week. Now the faith has been broken, and the Democratic leader says he is charting a new path.
"Unless Donald Trump realizes that the kind of deal I offered is good for him, it's better that he stays away," Schumer, D-N.Y., said in an interview last week. "If he disappears, we still, I think, have a very good chance to pass things, as long as he doesn't mess it all up, which could very well happen."
On Jan. 19, Schumer said Trump called him and proposed they cut a deal to prevent another budget extension without a DACA fix. At that meeting, the two discussed $25 billion in new spending for construction of a border wall.
The government shut down less than 12 hours later. Schumer later formally withdrew his $25 billion offer, a move that Republicans later said proved he isn't serious about reaching a deal.
Schumer blames the impasse over immigration and the subsequent shutdown on Trump's inability to strike a consistent position in private and public statements, fraying his trust in the president's usefulness as a negotiating partner.
But the episode also publicly exposed a divide among Senate Democrats and created the greatest challenge of Schumer's one-year tenure as minority leader. His most vulnerable members, facing difficult re-election bids this year in conservative states, were unwilling to keep the government closed over immigration. Activists, meanwhile, were enraged, and some of them convened in protest outside Schumer's Brooklyn home.
That divide is likely to complicate Schumer's role in this year's midterm elections, in which Democrats hope to pick up two seats to take control of the Senate -- but in which they are also defending 10 vulnerable incumbents in states that Trump won in 2016.
Schumer's gamble, at the moment, is that failure to secure protections for Dreamers will fall on Republicans -- and that Trump-state Democrats will be able to survive by tacking away from the more liberal wing of the party on immigration and other issues.
It's true that Democrats' short-lived resolve over the shutdown undermined a key point of leverage they had promised to use for months: to refuse any agreement on a future budget with Republicans unless protections were included for the roughly 1.8 million Dreamers.
After he agreed to reopen the government last week, Schumer admitted that any prolonged shutdown would likely work against Democratic interests, lowering the odds of it being used again. "You've got to be strategic and if things went too long, yeah, people might have turned against the Dreamers," Schumer said of the shutdown.
Amid the recriminations, Schumer still says Democrats have come out stronger because of the government shutdown. He said they were able to elevate the issue of protecting deferred-action program recipients and obtain a commitment from Republicans for Senate floor votes on the issue in February.
"We have heightened awareness of the Dreamers. It is much harder for Republicans to back off. Or just sweep it under the rug, which they have been doing for a year," Schumer said.
Information for this article was contributed by Mark Niquette, Ben Brody and Katia Dmitrieva of Bloomberg News; and by Michael Scherer and Ed O'Keefe of The Washington Post.
A Section on 01/29/2018