US Sen. Toomey: 'I Doubt DACA Will Be Tied To Tax Reform'

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — As Congress continues to hash out President Donald Trump's recent decisions regarding Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and his tax reform proposal, US Senator Pat Toomey, from Pennsylvania, says he doubts DACA will be tied to tax reform.

Toomey told The Rich Zeoli Show on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT that he thinks that alot of people are sympathetic to a 20-something kid who came to this country as an infant and obviously had no say in the matter.  Toomey says if that man or woman has been an exemplary person and has never done anything wrong, who's never known any other country, should they be deported to some country that is completely alien to them?

"So there's a great opportunity to say ok, let's go ahead and create a legal status and maybe even a passage to citizenship for these folks, but let's also recognize that doing that has implications and we should deal with that in a legislation that ties several things together.  So, one of the obvious implications is if you grant a legal status to people who came here illegally, you're pretty much inviting another wave of illegal folks that come here with the expectation that at some point they'll get a legal status too. So we should use the occasion to strengthen border security. We should use the occasion to crack down on sanctuary cities so that we don't have those handful of dangerous criminals among the illegal people getting an opportunity to live safely in some of our big cities. We ought to look at modifying our legal immigration system which is, I think too dependent on extended families and ought to be more based on merit. So I think a deal could be done here and frankly I hope we do."

As far as the Trump's plan for building and funding a wall? Toomey says that he thinks the wall is part of border security.

"I don't think it ever made sense to have a 2000 mile wall along the border. I don't think that's necessary, but there's some parts where we should have a wall, other parts where what we really need is more electronic surveillance, other parts where we need manpower on the border. So I'm in favor of whatever combination of tools to allow us to control our border. "