Trump Takes Tweet Request from Pelosi Over DACA

The unexpected message came just hours after the president cut a deal with Democrats over the debt ceiling.

Bill Clark/ZUMA

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Amid a national uproar over the Trump administration’s announcement ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program this week, President Donald Trump on Thursday appeared to try and reassure the initiative’s 800,000 recipients that they wouldn’t face deportation—at least for the next six months. 

The unexpected tweet came one day after the president insisted he had “no second thoughts” about rolling back the program.

What happened? It turns out, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called up Trump this morning hoping to convince him to send a message of hope to Dreamers. A Democratic aide told the Daily Beast: “Pelosi told her colleagues at a whip meeting this morning that she spoke to Trump this morning via phone and asked him to tweet this to make clear Dreamers won’t be subject to deportation in a six-month window.”

Pelosi’s role in influencing Trump’s tweets came just hours after Trump infuriated Republican leaders by cutting a deal with Democrats over the debt ceiling.

In fact, DACA recipients whose statuses are slated to expire in March do have something to worry about: recipients whose statuses expire in March are required to renew their applications before the October 5 deadline. 

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

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