OMRO, Wis. — Again and again, constituents at Rep. Glenn Grothman’s town hall meetings this week wanted to talk about DACA, “chain migration” and “the wall” — the right half of the vocabulary of the fierce immigration debate now playing out in Washington.
“Can’t they go back and get in line?” asked one woman who came to a dim municipal basement here, about 12 miles west of Oshkosh, on a recent weekday morning. “Why can’t they go back and do it legally?”
Grothman didn’t hesitate: “I’ll do all I can to hold out for as tough a position as we can get,” he told the woman, who declined to give her name to a reporter. “We’d rather shut down the government rather than go down the path of ruining America. And I think doing what some of those Democrats wanted — immediate legality for all these people and then just starting the open-borders thing again — could ruin America. I mean, it would be the end of America.”
President Trump has promised to protect young immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children and who are now living in limbo because of his cancellation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. And a bipartisan group of senators has been negotiating for days to reach a deal.
