Senators and members of the White House are working on a deal to protect illegal immigrants brought into the U.S. as children. The administration has a list of policy changes it wants in a deal to protect so-called Dreamers from deportation.
“Hiring more border patrol agents, placing more fencing along the border, maybe some more interior enforcement in exchange for legalizing roughly 700,000 or so recipients of DACA,” says Alex Nowrasteh, immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute.
The president himself announced in September he would end the Obama-era program.
“If DACA expires, he's not too sad about that, his supporters can be happy,” says Nowrasteh. “But if it does happen, he can say he saved some of these people and we got more border security and a wall in exchange.”
But he says any sort of amnesty could prove costly in next year's mid-term elections. “A lot of his supporters will be angry, they don't want DACA to be legalized permanently.”