White House transcript from immigration meeting initially excluded key line from Trump
The official White House transcript from President Trump's immigration meeting on Tuesday excluded a line from Mr. Trump in which he appears to agree to a clean bill to protect so-called "Dreamers."
"Yeah, I would like to do it," Mr. Trump said during the meeting at the White House after Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, asked about a clean bill for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
According to The Washington Post, the official transcript of the meeting, however, excluded that line. A White House official told the Post that the omission was not intentional.
An updated transcript released Wednesday morning contained the exchange.
Immediately after Mr. Trump told Feinstein he "would like to do" a clean DACA bill, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy jumped in to clarify, "I think what Senator Feinstein is asking here — when we talk about just DACA, we don't want to be back here two years later. We have to have security."
Republicans in the room argued that security measures would have to be part of a DACA deal. And the president suggested three things could be included. "It's kind of like three pillars: DACA, because we're all in the room want to do it; border security, so we're not back out here; and chain migration," Mr. Trump told the lawmakers. "It's just three items, and then everything else that's comprehensive is kind of moved to the side."
Feinstein was dubious, asking the president and McCarthy, "Do you really think there can be agreement on those three difficult subjects you raised in time to get DACA passed and effective?" McCarthy said it could be done, but Republican Sen. Jeff Flake also expressed reservations about combining too many things with the DACA fix. He recalled that the last attempt at substantive immigration reform had involved "six, seven months of every night negotiating, staff on weekends."
"A lot of things we're talking about on border security and some of the interior things have trade-offs. I don't see how we get there before March 5th," Flake told the group.
In response, Mr. Trump put DACA and border security into the same measure: "We do a phase one, which is DACA and security, and we do phase two, which is comprehensive immigration."
Also during the meeting, Mr. Trump told the group that he hoped to come up with "an answer for DACA" and said it should be a "bill of love" while remaining firm that his long-planned border wall would be part of any DACA agreement reached.
"I really do believe Democrats and Republicans, the people sitting in this room, really want to get something done," Mr. Trump said. He told them they should "put country before party," and he called for a permanent fix rather than a stop-gap bill.
"Let's see if we can get something done. I really think that we have a chance to do it. I think it's really important. You're talking about 800,000 people. You're talking about lots of other people who are affected, including people who live in our country, from a security standpoint," said Mr. Trump.
At same time however, Mr. Trump said that the U.S. needs stronger borders to block drug trafficking into the country, and he insisted on ending "chain migration" and "visa lottery" programs. The president said, as he has in the past, that other countries "give you the people they don't want" and "the United States takes those people."
CBS News' Emily Tillett contributed to this report.
