Immigration News: Mullin Floats DACA Green Card Path
The latest immigration news out of Washington is a sentence nobody in the Trump administration had said out loud before. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said on Monday that President Donald Trump had told him to start working with Democrats on immigration reform — and that Congress could create a path for DACA recipients to become permanent residents. In the same breath, Mullin ruled out amnesty and said deportations would not slow down. It is the clearest opening yet for an immigration deal in the new Congress.
Mullin spoke to reporters at a counter-drone conference in Maryland on Monday, November 9, a day after the president told CBS News his deportation crackdown may have been “too tough” and that he would like to do something on immigration with the Democrats. Mullin said a lot of Democrats had already called him about legislation in the new Congress. “I’ve let the president know that those calls are coming in, and the president has said, ‘Let’s start working with them and then let’s meet at some point,'” Mullin said, according to Fox News and the Daily Wire. It was, Fox News reported, the first time Mullin had publicly suggested such a pathway for DACA recipients.
The secretary drew a sharp line between the idea he was floating and the word he would not accept. “We’re never going to allow amnesty to happen,” Mullin said. But, he added, “if we want to have an immigration reform to where we can look at DACA and figure out a way that these individuals can become maybe legal permanent citizens or something like this, that’ll be up to Congress.” The distinction matters because DACA recipients hold no lawful immigration status: they are protected from deportation and allowed to work, but the programme rests on executive action and court orders rather than a statute. A green card path would turn a temporary, renewable reprieve into permanent residence. Mullin framed it as Congress’s call, but the fact that the cabinet secretary for immigration enforcement raised it at all is what made the remarks news.
The amnesty walkback, within hours
The opening did not survive the day unchallenged, and the challenge came from inside the administration itself. On the same day Mullin spoke, Trump told reporters at the White House: “There won’t be amnesty.” Mullin repeated the line on X, writing: “Amnesty will NEVER be on the table.” The two statements describe a narrow space: the administration is willing to talk about legal status for one defined group — people brought to the United States as children — while refusing any broader legalisation, and only while enforcement continues at full pace.
That second condition is not rhetorical. Mullin said he and the president had not discussed changing enforcement policy, and he has said repeatedly since the election that deportations will continue through the holidays and beyond. The Department of Homeland Security has set ICE a target of about 19,000 arrests a week, according to agency sources cited by CBS News, and Mullin told Fox News the department was deporting roughly 3,600 people a day with no plans to slow down. The administration is thus sending two messages at once.
The midterm verdict behind the opening
The timing explains the tension. In the November 3 midterm elections, Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate, and exit polling suggested the immigration crackdown was one of the reasons. Initial exit polls conducted by NBC News with other news organisations found that 57 per cent of voters said Trump’s immigration enforcement actions had gone too far. A CBS News exit poll put the figure at 58 per cent. Trump acknowledged the damage in the 60 Minutes interview that aired on Sunday, November 8, saying the crackdown had both helped and hurt his party, and that he had been hurt by deporting people who had good jobs and had committed a single violation — entering the country illegally. “I’d love to do something on immigration,” he said in that interview.
Hours later he named Stephen Miller, the architect of the hardline immigration agenda, as his new White House chief of staff, effective Monday, November 9. The promotion and the interview landed within hours of each other, and Washington has been arguing ever since about which one is the real signal. Miller’s appointment signalled staying the course; Mullin’s remarks the next day pointed the other way.
Pressed on Fox News: “Why did you float DACA?”
Mullin’s remarks drew their sharpest test on Tuesday, November 10, when he appeared on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle and host Laura Ingraham challenged him directly. “Why did you float DACA, Mr. Secretary?” she asked, arguing that Republicans had a long history of trying to strike immigration deals with Democrats and being burned by them. She named former Republican senators James Lankford, Marco Rubio and John McCain, and former President George W. Bush, as examples of Republicans whose immigration compromises had cost them with the party’s base.
Mullin pushed back, arguing that the specifics of any agreement would matter. Making people who entered the country illegally legal would be a non-starter, he said, but DACA was different, because it applies to children who were brought to the United States through no fault of their own. “DACA applies to children that were brought to this country at no fault of their own,” he said. “And some of them may not even speak English or never even lived in their country.” He added: “I think that there is a part that we can look to say, ‘Listen, you’re not going to become citizens because you weren’t born here, but is there a path for you to be legal?'”
The secretary was candid that such an agreement was a long shot. He noted that Trump had attempted to strike a similar deal in 2016 and that Democrats had not taken him up on the offer. He also stressed that the administration would not pursue any agreement without first securing support from Republican voters, saying: “We are going to make sure our base is with us on it.” And he repeated that Trump would have the final say, adding: “The President will not sign anything that isn’t in the right movement for this country and the Republican Party.” He also promised “zero change” to deportation policy.
What DACA is, and why only Congress can fix it
The programme at the centre of the argument was created in 2012, when President Barack Obama used executive action to offer deferred action — a temporary, renewable protection from deportation, plus work authorisation — to people who had been brought to the United States as children, had lived here continuously, and met education and conduct requirements. DACA does not provide lawful immigration status. It is a discretionary decision to defer removal, renewed every two years, and it can be withdrawn. That fragility is why its recipients, often called Dreamers, have lived fourteen years in legal suspense.
The numbers describe a programme that is shrinking even as it survives. About 436,000 people held active DACA status as of June 30, 2026, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data compiled by the National Immigration Forum, down from 455,170 on March 31, 2026. The total has fallen steadily since January 2025. USCIS approved 53,855 DACA renewals in the first half of fiscal year 2026, a 63 per cent drop from the nearly 145,000 approved in the same period of fiscal year 2025, and about 120,000 renewal applications were pending — the highest number ever recorded. Average processing times climbed from about 15 days in fiscal year 2025 to about 70 days at the start of 2026, with the USCIS website estimating a wait of about seven months by late October, according to Columbia News Service.
The courts have kept the programme alive while narrowing it. No new first-time DACA applications have been granted since a Texas federal court order in July 2021; USCIS accepts initial requests but cannot decide them. On January 17, 2025, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that DACA’s protection from deportation was constitutional as an exercise of prosecutorial discretion, but that its work authorisation component was potentially unlawful, and it narrowed the injunction to Texas. Neither side appealed to the Supreme Court, so the case returned to U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen in the Southern District of Texas, who must decide how to implement the ruling. Judge Hanen had not issued an implementing order as of October 2026. Texas had 82,410 DACA recipients at the end of 2025, the second-largest state population after California.
The legislative path: an old bill, a new Congress
If Congress is to settle DACA, the most likely vehicle is also the oldest one. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries named the American Dream and Promise Act on CBS on Monday as a starting point that would restore protections for DACA and Temporary Protected Status holders, according to Time. The bill, which would create a path to permanent residence and eventually citizenship for Dreamers and some TPS holders, passed the House in 2019 and again in 2021, but never received a Senate vote.
The maths in the new Congress is unforgiving. Democrats will control both chambers when the new Congress takes office on January 3, 2027, but most legislation still needs 60 votes to clear the Senate, which means any DACA bill would need Republican support. The opening positions are far apart. Jeffries has said reforming ICE and ending mass deportation would also be part of the conversation, according to Time, while the House Freedom Caucus posted on X that it rejects amnesty. Mullin’s conditions — no amnesty, no enforcement change, the base on board, the president’s approval — leave little room for a deal.
That is a narrow corridor. Democrats in the new Congress are preparing investigations into ICE operations and demanding restrictions on masked officers and the use of force, alongside protections for long-term residents. The White House has warned Democrats that their planned investigations could cross legal lines. Any DACA negotiation would therefore run alongside mutual investigations, while the enforcement campaign Democrats cite as leverage continues unpaused. Trump would likely demand that any agreement contain restrictions on legal immigration or new border security measures, while Democrats would want protections for the wider population of long-term residents caught up in the enforcement campaign.
What happens next
For now, there is no proposal, no draft bill, and no scheduled meeting — only a secretary saying the president told him to start talking, and a Democratic leadership that has named its starting point. The next test is whether the conversations Mullin described actually begin, and whether they produce anything concrete before the new Congress takes office in January.
For DACA recipients, the stakes are immediate and practical rather than political. Renewals are taking months, a record backlog is growing, and a court order in Texas could, when it eventually issues, strip work permits from more than 80,000 people in that state alone. A congressional fix would end that uncertainty at a stroke; a failed negotiation would leave the programme exactly where it has been for years — alive, shrinking, and one court order away from crisis. The door to a deal is open a crack. Whether that crack widens into legislation, or closes again under pressure from the administration’s own base, is the question the next two months will answer.
Source: Fox News