Trump Says He'll Get Around to Giving DACA Recipients Citizenship 'At Some Point in the Future'

Speaking to reporters early Wednesday evening, President Trump said his administration plans on providing a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients “at some point in the future,” USA Today reports.

“We’re going to morph into it … It’s going to happen, at some point in the future, over a period of 10 to 12 years,” Trump reportedly said. That timeframe—making young immigrants wait 10- to 12-years before receiving full citizenship—echoes the contents of a Senate immigration plan that leaked last week and was rumored to be the legislative body’s final bipartisan immigration reform effort.

Trump also reiterated on Tuesday his desire for a $25 billion wall along the U.S.-Mexico border (“If you don’t have a wall, you don’t have DACA”), and added that he’s seeking $5 billion for additional border security measures. The leaked Senate immigration plan granted Customs and Border Protection a meager $2.7 billion.

Just yesterday, Trump said in a series of tweets that “nobody knows for sure” whether Republicans and Democrats will be able to “reach a deal on DACA” by Feb. 8, the day funding for the government (as allocated in a stopgap measure to end the shutdown) will run out.

Correction: this post initially called DACA recipients “undocumented minors.” While all DACA recipients were brought to the United States as minors, they are not all minors. The headline has also been updated to more precisely reflect Trump’s comments about DACA.