Pelosi's 'make America white again' dig at Trump draws rebuke from fellow Democrat

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Senator Joe Manchin says ‘we don’t need that type of rhetoric’ after Pelosi condemned the White House’s immigration proposal

Nancy Pelosi said the immigration plan holds the Dreamers ‘hostage to a hateful anti-immigrant scheme’.
Nancy Pelosi said the immigration plan holds the Dreamers ‘hostage to a hateful anti-immigrant scheme’. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The West Virginia senator Joe Manchin on Sunday criticized House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi for dismissing a new White House immigration plan as a way to “make America white again”.

“We don’t need that type of rhetoric on either side, from Nancy, [Republican House speaker] Paul Ryan or anybody else,” said Manchin, a West Virginian moderate and a leader of a bipartisan Senate group working on immigration who spoke to CNN’s State of the Union.

Senior White House officials outlined the immigration plan on Thursday. It would offer a path to citizenship for up to 1.8 million undocumented migrants who were brought to the US as children.

Such people, known as Dreamers, were protected from deportation under an Obama-era program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) which Trump rescinded in September.

The proposal also would curb some legal immigration programs and build a border wall with Mexico. It asks for a $25bn “trust fund” for such measures.

The White House described the Dreamers offer as a major concession to Democrats, but the plan was quickly dismissed by leading party figures.

Pelosi said it holds Dreamers “hostage to a hateful anti-immigrant scheme” and accused the Trump administration of a campaign “to make America white again”.

Late on Saturday night, Trump tweeted: “I have offered DACA a wonderful deal, including a doubling in the number of recipients & a twelve year pathway to citizenship, for two reasons: (1) Because the Republicans want to fix a long time terrible problem. (2) 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. They are only interested in Obstruction!”

On Sunday the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, a proponent of immigration reform, told ABC’s This Week: “You don’t need $25bn for a wall … we’re not going to build a 1,900-mile wall but $25bn can be spent wisely.”

Manchin announced earlier this week that he will run for re-election this year in a state where Trump trounced Hillary Clinton in 2016.

In a separate interview on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, he said he thought the White House plan was “a good starting point”.

His comments highlighted the divisions among Democrats ahead of an 8 February deadline for Congress to pass another spending bill and try to reach an immigration agreement that would also protect Dreamers from deportation.

Manchin said the bipartisan group led by himself and moderate Maine Republican Susan Collins would meet on Monday evening to examine the White House proposal, adding he expected more details to emerge.

The group of more than 20 senators from both parties, which has been called the Common Sense Coalition, helped to end a three-day government shutdown driven by the Dreamers issue last week.

“I think we can find a pathway forward, I really do,” Manchin told NBC.

Collins, speaking to CBS’s Face the Nation, said the group hoped to influence a proposal that the Senate’s two whips, Republican John Cornyn and Democrat Dick Durbin, are trying to assemble.

“If [Cornyn and Durbin] agree, I have a feeling that that will be a bill that can go all the way to the president’s desk, and that’s our goal,” Collins said.