White House plays games with DREAMers' lives: "Depends on what we get in exchange"

Donald Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, accidentally told the truth on CNN Tuesday morning, conceding that the White House doesn’t really care about the nearly one million young, undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.

Instead, the White House sees those at-risk people as disposable bargaining chips, who might be deported this year to countries they don’t know if Trump doesn’t get all he wants from Democrats during upcoming negotiations.

CNN’s Chris Cuomo started by asking the Mulvaney a simple question: What is Trump’s position on DREAMers, and who gets to stay? When Mulvaney insisted the White House’s DREAMer position revolved around “border security,” Cuomo jumped in and pointed out that that’s not a DREAMer issue.

Cuomo pressed: “What are his terms and conditions? Who gets to stay?”

Mulvaney then tipped the White House’s hand. “Again, depends on what we get in exchange. What do we get for border security? What do we get for a wall?”

Cuomo repeatedly pressed Mulvaney over the White House’s strategy with regards to those affected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, implemented by President Barack Obama and what it would take to make sure the undocumented immigrants are allowed to stay in the U.S., as a vast majority Americans think they should be.

“Here’s what’s unusual: Compassion is usually not calibrated, OK?” noted the host. “If you care about a group of people, if you think there’s a humanitarian, or suffering, issue, you usually address that. And yes, you can want other things. But ordinarily your compassion for something is not calibrated to how much you get in return for helping them.”

Mulvaney’s comments seem to confirm that the reason Trump last September suddenly stripped 800,000 DREAMers of their protected status was he because he simply wanted to use them as a bargaining tool to get money from Congress to pay for a border wall that candidate Trump spent 2016 promising Mexico was going to pay for. (That’s not happening.)

This month, Trump made a public point of stressing how he wanted to pass a bill of “love” to protect the DREAMers. But since then, anti-immigration zealots inside the White House have blocked any and all attempts to reach a bipartisan compromise, and the White House is now openly admitting it has taken DREAMers hostage.

“A wall is an inanimate object, you can dicker about it,” Cuomo later noted to Mulvaney. “DREAMers are human beings and the idea that he will only be as generous —  or as loving, right? Because he said he wants a bill of love — as warranted by what he gets in return does not seem like love.”