Trump touts 'bill of love' for Dreamers and raises sweeping immigration reform

• President hosts meeting with Republican and Democratic lawmakers

• Trump offers to ‘take the heat’ on comprehensive reform

Donald Trump said legislation to shield young undocumented immigrants from deportation should be a “bill of love” and expressed a desire to enact comprehensive immigration reform, a legislative achievement that has eluded Congress for decades.

His comments appeared to endorse a plan that would offer millions of undocumented immigrants an eventual pathway to citizenship, telling Republican lawmakers that he would be willing to “take the heat” and shield them against the political backlash likely to emanate from hardline, conservative supporters who have viewed this approach as unacceptable.

Who are the Dreamers?

Dreamers are young immigrants who would qualify for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (Daca) program, enacted under Barack Obama in 2012. Most people in the program entered the US as children and have lived in the US for years “undocumented”. Daca gave them temporary protection from deportation and work permits. Daca was only available to people younger than 31 on 15 June 2012, who arrived in the US before turning 16 and lived there continuously since June 2007. Most Dreamers are from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras and the largest numbers live in California, Texas, Florida and New York. Donald Trump cancelled the program in September but has also said repeatedly he wants Congress to develop a program to “help” the population.

What will happen to the Dreamers?

Under the Trump administration, new applications under Daca will no longer be accepted. For those currently in the program, their legal status and other Daca-related permits (such as to work and attend college) will begin expiring in March 2018 – unless Congress passes legislation allowing a new channel for temporary or permanent legal immigration status – and Dreamers will all lose their status by March 2020.

Technically, as their statuses lapse they could be deported and sent back to countries many have no familiarity with. It is still unclear whether this would happen. Fear had been rising in the run-up to last week’s announcement. Those with work permits expiring between 5 September 2017 and 5 March 2018 will be allowed to apply for renewal by 5 October.

Read a full guide to Daca here

Trump’s support for comprehensive immigration reform during a White House meeting with a bipartisan group of lawmakers amid tense negotiations over a budget deal and the fate of Dreamers, the nearly 700,000 beneficiaries of an Obama-era program known as Daca that protects immigrants brought to the US as children from deportation. Trump rescinded the program and gave Congress until March to find a legislative fix.

“I really do believe Democrats and Republicans, the people sitting in this room, really want to get something done,” Trump told the assembled lawmakers, a group that holds a wide range of opinions on immigration.

Trump has repeatedly stated that any deal that would enshrine the Daca program into law must include funding for a border wall, which was a central promise of his presidential campaign.

During the meeting, he repeated those conditions, and said that a compromise must include an end to the family-based immigration policy, which he refers to as “chain migration”, and the elimination of the “visa lottery” program, which he mischaracterized as an initiative that allows countries to “give you the people they don’t want”.

“In order to secure it, we need a wall. We need closing enforcement – we have to close enforcement loopholes,” he said.

But Trump on Tuesday went further than endorsing a solution to Daca, and suggested lawmakers tackle the far broader problem – the status of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the country.

“You created an opportunity here, Mr President, and you need to close the deal,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, urging the president to tackle comprehensive immigration reform.

“If you want to take it that further step, I’ll take the heat,” Trump replied, adding: “You are not that far away from comprehensive immigration reform.”

Later in the conversation, which Trump allowed press cameras to record, he returned to the subject, appearing to endorse a two-phase approach that would include a deal on Daca and border security followed by comprehensive immigration reform “the next afternoon”.

During the closed-door portion of the meeting, lawmakers and the White House agreed to narrow negotiations to four key issues: border security, so-called “chain migration”, the visa diversity lottery and the Dreamers.

Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said the meeting “boded well” for a compromise but cautioned that there are still a number of sticking points and “the devil lies in the details”.

Among the list of outstanding questions is the timeline. Republicans want action on Daca to proceed separately from budget negotiations but Democrats are hoping to tie the two in a rare moment of leverage for the minority party.

Congress must pass a federal budget by 19 January to avert a partial government shutdown, and the vote will require Democratic support. Democrats believe this is their best, and perhaps only, opportunity to demand action on Daca before the program ends on 5 March.

During the discussion, Trump also backed off his demand for a 2,000-mile barrier along the full length of the US-Mexico border. Republican lawmakers said the concession was a breakthrough in negotiations with Democrats, who have drawn a hard line on funding the construction of a physical barrier.

“The president today has backed off any kind of description that he’s looking for a sea-to-shining-sea fence or wall,” said senator James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma who was at the meeting.

“He backed up and said I’m not looking for that,” Lankford continued. “That’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re going to do technology in some areas. That’s one of things Democrats have pushed very hard on to say technology needs to be the lead not wall in some areas. he consented to that today.”

Almost immediately after Trump’s remarks on immigration, he came under attack from far-right conservatives who advocate for lower immigration and have derided comprehensive immigration reform as “amnesty”. Conservative commentator Ann Coulter, for instance, accused Trump of wavering in his views on immigration and denounced his willingness to negotiate with Democrats.

Graham argued that the president would shield Republicans from these attacks, making immigration reform achievable this time around.

“President Trump has the loudest voice I’ve seen. I think the people on the right are going to defer to him,” Graham said.

“If we listen to the Ann Coulters of the world, we’re going nowhere. If we listen to the resist movement, we’re going nowhere,” he added, alluding to liberals who oppose Trump’s agenda. “Here’s the good news: Ann Coulter and the resist movement are the outliers.”