January 25, 2018
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump is offering a path to citizenship for up to 1.8 million young illegal immigrants but insists on measures that would curb some legal immigration programs and provide a border wall with Mexico, senior White House officials said on Thursday.

Furthermore:

"But she (Kamala Harris) also called on Congress to create a pathway to citizenship for those who are undocumented. The irony is that it was Democrats, not Republicans, who killed the last, best chance to create that pathway, at least for “Dreamers.”

In January 2018, President Trump put an offer on the table, a proposal he and others had been working on since the previous September. He wanted Congress to provide $25 billion in funding to build a wall along the Southern border (even though he always said Mexico would pay for it).

“In exchange,” Reuters reported at the time, “he said he wanted to offer the Dreamers protection from deportation and an ‘incentive’ of citizenship, perhaps in 10 to 12 years.”

The “Dreamers” refers to President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a 2012 executive order that allowed nearly 700,000 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children to avoid deportation and granted temporary lawful status, which included certain privileges such as work permits. Trump reportedly upped that number soon after to some 1.8 million people.

But Democrats resoundingly rejected the offer. While they pointed to several concerns with other parts of Trump’s proposal, border-wall funding was their real bête noire.

Trump returned to the issue a year later, in January 2019, during a partial government shutdown. He offered “three years of protections for immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children and those who fled certain countries and are covered under the ‘temporary protected status’ program,” according to NBC News. And he asked for only $5.7 billion.

Trump took a lot of heat from his base for making such an offer, but Democrats said no again. They didn’t even sit down for a give-and-take session, which is how you come to a compromise that both sides can live with."