President Donald Trump signaled an openness Thursday to soften his campaign-era hard-line stance on immigration, suggesting he will work with Congress to protect undocumented immigrants who entered the country undocumented as children.
“We are gonna deal with DACA with heart,” Trump pledged at a news conference Thursday, referring to former President Barack Obama’s deferred action program for so-called Dreamers. “I have to deal with a lot of politicians — don’t forget — and I have to convince them that what I’m saying is right. And I appreciate your understanding on that.”
Trump stressed that DACA is “very, very difficult” but maintained that, as a father and grandfather, he loves children.
“I find it very, very hard doing what the law says exactly to do. And you know the law’s rough,” he said. “I’m not talking about new laws. I’m talking the existing law is very rough. It’s very, very rough.”
He added that DACA is also “a very, very difficult subject for me.”
“To me, it’s one of the most difficult subjects I have because you have these incredible kids — in many cases, not in all cases,” he said. “In some of the cases, they’re having DACA and they’re gang members and they’re drug members, too. But you have some absolutely incredible kids — I would say mostly — they were brought in here in such a way. It’s a very, very tough subject.”
Trump, however, held a much stronger position during the campaign. In a major immigration policy speech last August, Trump said undocumented immigrants seeking legal status had only one route to citizenship: “to return home and apply for re-entry like everybody else under the rules of the new legal immigration system that I have outlined,” he said then, promising to “break the cycle of amnesty and illegal immigration.”
“There will be no amnesty,” he declared then.
