They want more than tax cuts

The White House on Sunday night appeared to scuttle a deal on so-called Dreamers—undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children—when it released a series of largely conservative policies that it wanted included in the final package.

Top congressional Democrats immediately denounced the proposals as poison pills, meant to undermine efforts to codify an Obama-era program to shield Dreamers from deportation, dubbed Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

But though they were caught off guard by the announcement, the signs were certainly there beforehand.

For weeks, top officials to the president have been working behind the scenes to upend a DACA deal that President Trump had been struck with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. And spearheading the campaign of behind-the-scenes impairment was White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller.

A need for a deal had been necessitated by the Trump administration’s decision to end DACA over the course of six months. But in the weeks after that decision was made, the president, along with Schumer and Pelosi agreed to a framework to protect DACA recipients in exchange for enhanced border security measures that notably did not include funding a border wall, Miller got to work.

Miller, a staunch immigration hawk, was conspicuously left out of the bipartisan dinner meeting where that DACA framework had been formed. By the morning after the dinner, Miller, sources say, was already in discussions with Capitol Hill offices about how to ensure conservative policy gains ended up in the final deal his boss might cut.

A hard-lined anti-immigration advocate, Miller strategized with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) about a more specific, more conservative, set of extractions the White House would demand in the deal. Cotton was the natural choice—he is one of the Senate’s most conservative members on the immigration issue, and the co-author of legislation, dubbed the RAISE Act, to significantly limit the number of legal immigrants to the U.S.