WASHINGTON _ The door to chief of staff John Kelly's West Wing office swung open Wednesday evening and a familiar voice belted out, "Hello, everybody." It was President Donald Trump. The White House's soft rollout of its immigration overhaul plan was about to kick into high gear.
About 24 hours later, many congressional Democrats were condemning the White House's plan, conservative Republicans were praising it, and more moderate members of both parties remained quiet as efforts to craft a competing bill continued behind closed doors.
Here are three takeaways from the White House's soft launch of its overhaul plan.
The White House tried in the days before briefing reporters and congressional aides on the details of the plan to soften its message about immigration and its policy whims.
The president recently said he wanted to write legislation to help the Dreamers based on "love." When Trump popped into the Wednesday evening session in Kelly's office, he had a message for the roughly 700,000 people now enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program: "Tell them not to worry." The next day, a senior administration official described the White House plan as "extremely generous."
But behind the softer rhetoric and the offer to roughly double the Dreamer population were clear signs that immigration hardliners on Trump's staff are still leading the White House effort.
That senior administration official used the kind of tough talk about immigrants that has left many Democrats wondering if they can really strike a deal with Trump and his team. The official talked at length about deporting "criminal aliens," calling many "violent offenders" and saying illegal immigrants are responsible for "people being horribly hurt." Repeatedly, the senior official drew a straight line between illegal immigrants and crime on U.S. citizens.
Also a clear indication the hardliners have Trump's ear: The plan's proposed changes to legal immigration, including its proposals to end the Diversity Visa Lottery Program and limit so-called "chain migration" to spouses and minor children. The White House hard-liners are eager to win votes and get as much of their agenda in a final product as possible. So they have bent without breaking. That's why the package could be called Hard-line Lite.
Senior administration officials who briefed reporters on the White House plan on Thursday said all they want is for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to bring the White House package to the floor in early February.
It will have competition, however. And that appears just fine with White House officials.
A bipartisan group of senators is working to get a compromise measure ready for floor action at the same time. But even before the Senate on Monday had passed a stopgap funding measure that re-opened the government, Trump and White House officials were working to get in front of the bipartisan group, which includes Sens. Richard J. Durbin and Lindsey Graham.
Trump recently angrily rejected a compromise overhaul measure those two brought to him, and White House officials on Thursday said the duo has never proposed a single immigration change this administration could accept.
The senior administration official signaled the White House _ at least in the messaging battle _ is racing the bicameral group to the political center. The official used terms like "a compromise on many fronts" and a "down the middle" proposal capable of garnering "a real groundswell of support from serious" members of both parties while describing the Trump plan.
At first blush, what the president described Wednesday evening _ a pathway to citizenship for the Dreamers essentially in exchange for southern border wall funding _ sounded a lot like what he and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer discussed last Friday while trying to strike an eleventh-hour deal to avert a government shutdown.
Schumer said last weekend that Trump "picked a number for the wall, and I accepted it" during the Friday Oval Office session. He also reportedly agreed that most of the $25 billion the administration wants for it would be appropriated up front. In exchange, Schumer and Democrats would have gotten the DACA fix they shut down the government in pursuit of.
Trump seemed to be describing just that on Wednesday evening. But the longer senior administration talked on Thursday, the clearer it became that the White House hard-liners _ and their conservative allies on Capitol Hill _ had won the day in crafting the White House plan.
The goal of the Thursday afternoon session was to put down markers and try to marry a majority of House Republicans with most Senate Republicans and just enough red-state Democrats to clear a 60-vote threshold. But, at times, and depending on which senior administration official was speaking, had a kind of take-it-or-leave-it feel.
"Think of this as DACA," the first senior administration official said while holding up a one-page printout of the White House's plan, "all of this as DACA."
