STATEMENT: No Legitimate Negotiation Can Happen While Trump Is Starving American Workers to Get His Way, Says CAP’s Neera Tanden

Washington, D.C. — In response to the Trump administration’s so-called compromise proposal to Democrats—which was negotiated unilaterally, without consultation from Democrats, and falls well short of a real bipartisan solution that would protect Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients—Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, issued the following statement:

President Donald Trump needs to stop playing games and open the government. Hundreds of thousands of families are going without paychecks, millions more are without vital services, and the entire country is exhausted. DACA and TPS recipients are critically important and are also victims of the president’s cruelty, but no legitimate negotiation can happen while President Trump is literally starving American workers to get his way.

Let us also be clear that this is not a compromise. President Trump created a crisis by moving to strip protections from 1 million longtime residents with DACA and TPS, and then created another crisis by proudly dragging the country into a shutdown and withholding pay from 800,000 federal workers and countless more federal contractors. From this untenable position of weakness, President Trump now wants to capitalize on these self-made crises to get $5.7 billion for his unpopular and ineffective vanity project of a wall, trash our asylum laws, and remove protections for children fleeing violence and abuse.

CAP experts are available to speak on this topic. To coordinate, please contact Rafael J. Medina at [email protected] or 202.748.5313.