Trump v Pueblos Sin Fronteras

TRUMP TAKES DACA OFF TABLE: President Donald Trump repudiated legislative deals to protect Dreamers from deportation in a tweet Sunday morning. The president urged Congress to end the legislative filibuster in order to crack down on immigration. "Republicans must go to Nuclear Option to pass tough laws NOW. NO MORE DACA DEAL!" he wrote. In the same tweet, Trump warned of "caravans" of people headed to the border. "It was unclear whether the president's tweets represented any change in his immigration policy," wrote Katie Rogers in the New York Times, "or were just the sort of venting he is known to do after reading a newspaper article or seeing a television program." That was Rogers' polite way of saying that Trump almost certainly was just venting. 

Trump's "caravans" are actually one (fairly large) caravan of about 1000 people travelling north. "Hundreds of Central Americans - children, women, and men, most of them from Honduras - have boldly crossed immigration checkpoints, military bases, and police in a desperate, sometimes chaotic march toward the United States," Adolfo Flores reported Friday for BuzzFeed News. "Despite their being in Mexico without authorization, no one has made any effort to stop them. Organized by a group of volunteers called Pueblos Sin Fronteras, or People Without Borders, the caravan is intended to help migrants safely reach the United States, bypassing not only authorities who would seek to deport them, but gangs and cartels who are known to assault vulnerable migrants."

"When they get to the U.S., they hope American authorities will grant them asylum or, for some, be absent when they attempt to cross the border illegally," Flores writes. "More likely is that it will set up an enormous challenge to the Trump administration's immigration policies and its ability to deal with an organized group of migrants numbering in the hundreds. The number of people who showed up to travel with the caravan caught organizers by surprise, and has overwhelmed the various towns they've stopped in to spend the night." More here. 

In response to a questions about his Sunday tweets, the president said Democrats "blew" an opportunity for a DACA deal. "They had a great, great chance but we'll have to take a look, because Mexico has got to help us at the border," he said. Trump also threatened to blow up NAFTA if Mexico did not "stop the big drug and people flows" in a later tweet. Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray said his country would continue to work with the U.S. on migration without taking on Trump's remarks directly. "An inaccurate news report should not serve to question this strong cooperation," he wrote on Twitter. "Upholding human dignity and rights is not at odds with the rule of law." Read more from POLITICO's Brent Griffiths here. Read the New York Times's Rogers here.