Lawmakers and advocates on both sides began to stake out positions Monday for an extended public fight over whether Congress should provide legal status to young undocumented immigrants known as “dreamers” as President Trump is preparing to rescind Obama-era protections for them.

Moderate congressional Republicans, and even some conservatives, suggested that they are open to crafting a legislative deal that could offer permanent legal status to hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have been in the country illegally since they were children. Democrats lambasted Trump for his expected decision and called on the GOP to join them to protect the dreamers.

Urgency on Capitol Hill has mounted amid reports that Trump will end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has allowed nearly 800,000 people to live and work in the United States without fear of deportation. Trump, who is scheduled to announce his decision Tuesday, is leaning toward terminating the program but delaying enforcement for six months to give lawmakers time to find a solution, according to people briefed on the White House’s deliberations.

Trump faces a Tuesday deadline from Texas and several other states that have vowed to sue the administration over DACA if the president does not terminate it. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, an immigration hawk, has suggested that the Justice Department would not be able to defend the program’s constitutionality in court and has lobbied Trump to end it. Other top advisers, including Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, have pushed him to maintain the program until lawmakers act.

Yet the odds that a sharply polarized Congress could strike a deal — steep in the best of times — are considered especially difficult at a time when lawmakers face a busy fall agenda. Congress is under pressure to raise the federal debt limit, pass a spending bill and approve a defense authorization bill, at a time when Republicans also hope to consider a tax plan and potentially try once again to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who has been involved in previous bipartisan immigration reform efforts, said he would support Trump’s plan to end DACA after a six-month delay. In a statement, Graham said the program amounted to “presidential overreach” by President Barack Obama, who created it by executive action in 2012.

But Graham added that he empathizes with the dreamers who “know no country other than America. If President Trump makes this decision, we will work to find a legislative solution to their dilemma.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Trump is poised to “break the hearts and offend the morals of all who believe in justice and human dignity.” She called on Republicans to pursue legislation to protect dreamers “from the senseless cruelty of deportation and shield families from separation and heartbreak.”

Trump’s decision to include a six-month delay could be a bid to shift some of the political pressure and consequences over the dreamers onto congressional Republicans. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (Utah) and several other GOP leaders have urged Trump not to end the program and to let Congress pursue its own course of action.

The president and his senior advisers continued to deliberate Monday afternoon, and aides cautioned that Trump could still change his mind ahead of the announcement. Important details such as whether the administration would continue to accept DACA applications and issue renewals for two-year work permits during the six-month delay remained unresolved.

It also remains unclear whether Texas and the other states would move forward with their lawsuit if Trump announces that he will end the program in six months.

A deal on the dreamers has eluded Congress before — most recently in 2010, when the Dream Act, which would have offered the younger immigrants a path to citizenship, failed by five votes in the Senate after passing the House.

Ryan and other GOP leaders have not laid out a new legislative path, including whether the dreamers’ future would be addressed in isolation — which would appeal to Democrats and moderates — or be coupled with proposals to increase border security and tighten immigration controls, which could win greater support from conservatives.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), an immigration hard-liner, suggested that he would be open to giving the dreamers legal permanent residence provided that any deal also include his legislative proposal, called the Raise Act, which would slash legal immigration levels by half over a decade.

Trump offered public support for that bill during an appearance with Cotton and Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), its co-sponsor, at the White House last month.

In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Cotton emphasized that he thinks the new class of green-card holders represented by the dreamers must be offset with cuts elsewhere.

“We should find a way to give [them] legal status,” he said, “but we also have to mitigate the inevitable consequences of that action.”

Others have suggested that Trump could attempt to use the dreamers to bargain for a down payment — an estimated $1.6 billion — on the U.S.-Mexico border wall he promised voters during the campaign. Senior lawmakers have shown no signs that they plan to support the wall in upcoming budget negotiations.

Such package deals were quickly discounted by immigration hawks and immigrant rights advocates Monday.

“Why would you have to make a bargain with the rule of law?” asked Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), an early Trump supporter who has vehemently opposed legal status for undocumented immigrants. “These are bright lines we’re talking about.”

Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, an immigrant rights organization, said that advocates are still pressing the White House to maintain DACA and that they hold out hope that Trump will protect the program.

However, if the president moves to unwind it, Sharry said, advocates think they will have the upper hand in a legislative fight, given polls that show broad public support for allowing dreamers to stay in the country.

A trade of the dreamers for tougher immigration restrictions or border wall funding “would not even pass the laugh test,” Sharry said. “The momentum is with the dreamers.”

Meanwhile, leading Democrats have said privately that they think Trump has been boxed in politically. His inability to secure funding for the border wall is wearing down support among his base, these Democrats said, while his hard-line immigration rhetoric is hurting him with moderates.

When rumors about Trump’s expected actions on DACA first surfaced nearly two weeks ago, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) tweeted that dreamers “are not a bargaining chip for the border wall” funding or to pay for an “inhuman deportation force.”

One factor that could alter the political calculus for Democrats is if the Trump administration were to start deporting large numbers of immigrants whose DACA protections have expired. Although administration officials have said they are not targeting dreamers, immigration rights advocates said they fear that more dreamers are bound to be swept up in deportation proceedings as the Department of Homeland Security widens its enforcement net.

Leon Fresco, an immigration lawyer who previously served as an aide to Schumer, said he doesn’t think Congress would muster the political will to reach a deal on the dreamers — even if the administration begins ramping up deportations.

“I don’t know if that’s a strategy Democrats will want to reward or not. I don’t know where the advocacy community will be,” Fresco said. “Really, I just see a lot of bluster but nothing happening.”

Immigration hawks, meanwhile, are gearing up to ensure that Ryan and other congressional moderates do not “give away” the dreamers without getting enough in return. Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower immigration levels, has proposed a deal that couples legal status for dreamers with the immigration curbs in the Cotton-Perdue bill.

What he does not support, Krikorian emphasized, is legalizing the dreamers for money for the border wall.

The “appeal of the six-month delay” in rescinding DACA is that “it kicks it beyond the budget fight,” Krikorian said.

To Trump supporters outside Washington, the most important part of the president’s decision is living up to his campaign promises, said Dale Jackson, a conservative radio host in Huntsville, Ala.

Jackson, who in February asked then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer why Trump had not ended DACA, said he does not expect Congress to close a deal to provide a haven for dreamers. Trump, he suggested, knows that, too.

“Trump is probably doing the best he can do in this situation,” Jackson said. “He ends the program and asks Congress to come up with a solution knowing . . . they can’t. You see guys like Paul Ryan saying they want to do something to protect these people but they are not able to get anything through Congress.”

Ed O’Keefe, Maria Sacchetti, Sean Sullivan and David Weigel contributed to this report.

SEOUL — South Korea’s defense minister on Monday said it was worth reviewing the redeployment of American tactical nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula to guard against the North, a step that analysts warn would sharply increase the risk of an accidental conflict.

As concern over Korea deepened following North Korea’s huge nuclear test Sunday, Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was “begging for war.”

Here in Seoul, the Defense Ministry warned that Pyongyang might be preparing to launch another missile into the Pacific Ocean, perhaps an intercontinental ballistic missile theoretically capable of reaching the mainland United States.

President Trump and his South Korean counterpart, Moon Jae-in, spoke on the phone for 40 minutes Monday night, Korean time — some 34 hours after the nuclear test and more than 24 hours after Trump took to Twitter to criticize Moon’s “talk of appeasement.”

The two agreed to remove the limit on allowed payloads for South Korean missiles — something Seoul had been pushing for — as a way to increase deterrence against North Korea, according to a statement from South Korea’s Blue House.

They agreed as well to work together to punish North Korea for Sunday’s nuclear test, pledging “to strengthen joint military capabilities,” a White House statement said, and to “maximize pressure on North Korea using all means at their disposal.”

In a later phone call, Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel “reaffirmed” the necessity of coordinating a response at the United Nations.

At a U.N. Security Council meeting, Haley pressed for the “strongest possible” sanctions against the North. The administration plans to circulate a new sanctions draft this week. Haley did not spell out how she would overcome the objections of veto-wielding permanent members China and Russia. 

But she cautioned, “War is never something the United States wants. We don’t want it now. But our country’s patience is not unlimited. We will defend our allies and our territory.”

Haley ruled out the “freeze for freeze” proposal backed by China and Russia, which would suspend U.S. joint military exercises with South Korea in return for suspension of North Korean nuclear and missile tests.

“When a rogue regime has a nuclear weapon and an ICBM pointed at you, you do not take steps to lower your guard. No one would do that. We certainly won’t,” she said.

Instead, she reiterated a White House threat from Sunday to cut off trade with any countries that also trade with North Korea. That would presumably include China, with which the United States had nearly $650 billion worth of trade in goods and services last year.

“The United States will look at every country that does business with North Korea as a country that is giving aid to their reckless and dangerous nuclear intentions,” she said.

Her remarks appeared to be unpersuasive. “China will never allow chaos and war” in Korea, said Liu Jieyi, the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations. Sanctions alone will not solve the crisis, said Russia’s U.N. ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia.

[ North Korea defies predictions — again — with early grasp of weapons milestone ]

Earlier Monday, South Korean Defense Minister Song Young-moo said that he asked his American counterpart, Jim Mattis, during talks at the Pentagon last week that strategic assets such as  U.S. aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and B-52 bombers be sent to South Korea more regularly.

“I told him that it would be good for strategic assets to be sent regularly to the Korean Peninsula and that some South Korean lawmakers and media are strongly pushing for tactical nuclear weapons [to be redeployed],” Song told a parliamentary hearing on North Korea’s nuclear test, without disclosing Mattis’s response. 

A poll that YTN, a cable news channel, commissioned in ­August found that 68 percent of respondents said they supported bringing tactical nuclear weapons back to South Korea.

“The redeployment of tactical nuclear weapons is an alternative worth a full review,” Song said, echoing a position closely associated with conservatives in South Korea but not with progressives like Moon, who was elected president in May after vowing to engage with the North.

[ Seoul tries to ignore Trump’s criticism: ‘They worry he’s kind of nuts,’ one observer says ]

The United States had about 100 nuclear-armed weapons, including short-range artillery, stationed in South Korea until 1991. Then President George H.W. Bush signed the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives and withdrew all tactical nuclear weapons that had been deployed abroad.

Shortly afterward, the two Koreas signed an agreement committing to making the peninsula free of nuclear weapons — a deal that North Korea violated by developing its own nuclear arms. But Pyongyang has maintained that Seoul has also broken its promise because remaining under the U.S. nuclear umbrella is tantamount, it says, to having such weapons.

After the defense minister spoke at the hearing, the South Korean president’s office said that it was not considering redeploying tactical nuclear weapons. “Our government’s firm stance on the nuclear-free peninsula remains unchanged,” said Kim Dong-jo, a spokesman for Moon.

Military experts in the United States are almost universally opposed to the idea of deploying strategic or tactical weapons in South Korea.  

“The thing that most concerns me about redeployment is that it introduces more room for miscalculation or unintended escalation,” said Catherine Dill of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif. 

In that situation, the ability to react more quickly could be a negative factor.

From the perspective of the military alliance between the United States and South Korea, having long-range ballistic missiles or strategic bombers is “perfectly sufficient” to continue to deter North Korea, Dill said.

As alliance partners, the U.S. and South Korean militaries work in close cooperation, regularly conducting drills together. This includes sending “strategic assets” such as bombers stationed on the Pacific island of Guam over South Korea on a regular basis, and having submarines make port calls during exercises.

As the North Korean threat has increased this year, the United States has sent F-35 stealth aircraft and other strike fighters on flyovers across the southern half of the peninsula in a not-so-thinly veiled warning to Kim. The U.S. Pacific Command even released photos last week of B-1B Lancers dropping bombs on a range on the southern side of the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas.

But a growing number of policy­makers in Seoul say that Guam is too far away and that, if the South comes under attack from North Korea, it can’t wait the two-plus hours it would take American bombers to arrive from their base in the Pacific. 

“We need these strategic or tactical assets that can destroy North Korea’s nuclear-capable missiles before they can inflict harm on us,” said Chun Yung-woo, a former South Korean national security adviser. 

“Right now they can retaliate, but by that time, tens of thousands of people might have been killed,” Chun said. “We need a first layer of offensive weapons stationed closer to North Korea’s nuclear and missile sites.”

Jon Wolfsthal, a nuclear expert who served on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council, said that in the South Korean context, “strategic assets” are all about giving “a tangible sense of reassurance” to the government in Seoul.

“The reassurance bucket is bottomless,” Wolfsthal said. “You can pour stuff into it and it’s never going to fill up.”

South Korean officials have been asking for fighter jets and ballistic missile-equipped submarines to be based on the peninsula, and have long wanted B-1Bs and B-52s to land rather than just fly over — all to give a greater sense of U.S. commitment to South Korea.

But there are good logistical reasons that can’t happen, ­Wolfsthal said. For one, South Korea doesn’t have airstrips long enough for big, heavy B-52s, and second, the United States does not want its high-tech fighter jets sitting within North Korean artillery range.

[ Don’t be surprised by North Korea’s missiles. Kim Jong Un is doing what he said he would.  ]

South Korea has been flexing its military muscles in response to North Korea’s provocations, practicing at dawn Monday for strikes on the North Korean nuclear test site at Punggye-ri.

The South Korean air force will stage a live-fire drill, launching Taurus air-to-surface guided missiles from F-15K fighter jets, later this month, the Defense Ministry said Monday. The missiles have a range of 300 miles — enough to carry out precision strikes on North Korea’s key nuclear and missile sites.

The ministry also said it had seen signs of preparation for another North Korean ballistic missile launch, and South Korea’s national intelligence service told lawmakers that it could be another intercontinental ballistic missile.

Yoonjung Seo in Seoul and Anne Gearan in Washington contributed
to this report.

Read more:

Trump’s tweets include jab at ally South Korea

Trump: ‘All options are on the table’ after North Korea launched missile over Japan

Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

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President Trump is expected to phase out the Obama-era program that grants work permits to about 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, but delay its end for six months to give Congress time to pass legislation to replace it, according to multiple people briefed on the president’s discussions.

Trump’s plan remains fluid and could change, however, and administration officials stressed Sunday evening that the president has not finalized his decision. The White House has scheduled an announcement for Tuesday.

Trump has been wrestling over the future of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program since the start of his presidency, and he has been known to change his mind about difficult policy issues until the moment he makes public a decision.

Politico first reported Sunday evening that Trump had decided to end the DACA program.

Two people briefed on Trump’s deliberations and a third person with knowledge of the internal discussions said that the White House is preparing to slowly phase out the program so Congress could pass legislation for an alternative program to help the program’s recipients, known as “Dreamers.” All of these people spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions.

Many questions remain about how the policy would be implemented, including how long after Trump’s announcement current DACA beneficiaries would have to renew their protected status.

Should Trump move forward with this decision, he would effectively be buying time and punting responsibility to Congress to determine the fate of the Dreamers. There is a consensus view among many of his top advisers that the DACA program, which President Barack Obama created by executive action, would not stand up in a court of law.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and recently departed chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon have advocated a hard-line immigration stance with the president, including ending DACA.

During the campaign, Trump vowed to end DACA immediately. But he has since voiced sympathy for the program’s beneficiaries, many of whom immigrated to the United States as young children and have lived here for most of their lives.

“We love the Dreamers,” Trump told reporters Friday in the Oval Office. “We think the Dreamers are terrific.”

Surrogates for Trump said Sunday that American workers would benefit from an end to the DACA program, which has let undocumented children work and study in the United States without fear of deportation, but congressional Republicans urged the White House to leave the program intact.

Trump “wants to do what’s fair to the American worker, what’s fair to people in this country who are competing for jobs and other benefits,” counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said Sunday on “Fox Friends.” She said the president’s decision should be viewed as part of an “entire economic and domestic agenda” that includes an end to sanctuary cities, increased border security and constructing a wall along the southern border.

Young immigrants and supporters attend a rally in Los Angeles on Saturday in support of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)

HOUSTON — He came to Texas with hugs and smiles. At an evacuation shelter, he hoisted a little girl above his shoulders, got into a scrum with a young boy wielding a plastic sword and pulled on disposable gloves to serve hot dogs. At a church, he called on people to pray and loaded care packages into pickup trucks and minivans.

“It’s good exercise,” he quipped as he lifted boxes of supplies, slapping the side of a truck.

If President Trump’s first visit on Tuesday to flood-ravaged Southeast Texas was all about projecting competence, then his Saturday return was about showing compassion — albeit with a dose of self-congratulation.

The president got to work acting like, well, a president. In a full day of visits with storm survivors and emergency management officials, the president tried to convey empathy and a personal commitment to the long-term recovery of America’s fourth-largest city after the devastation of Hurricane Harvey.

“They say two years, three years, but I think that because this is Texas you’ll probably do it in six months!” Trump said as he delivered a pep talk of sorts to volunteers at a church in the Houston suburb of Pearland.

Trump’s optimism seemed to belie the far more complicated reality of rebuilding lives here, however. After talking with families who had lost their homes to Harvey’s floodwaters, Trump said he was struck by how “happy” they were.

“We saw a lot of happiness,” Trump said after he and his wife, Melania, toured the NRG Center, a cavernous convention hall transformed into an evacuation center. The first lady, who donned a custom baseball cap that read “TEXAS” on the front and “FLOTUS” on the back, handed out books to displaced children.

“They’re really happy with what’s going on,” the president said of the evacuees.

Making his second visit to the region since Harvey came ashore Aug. 25, Trump toured Houston as well as Lake Charles, La. On his first trip to Texas, Trump focused almost exclusively on the government’s response and stayed out of the disaster zone, in part because the presidential entourage could have interfered with rescue efforts.

In both Houston and Lake Charles, fans lined streets wearing “Make America Great Again” caps and Trump-branded T-shirts, holding up signs. “Texans love stilettos,” read one handmade sign, an apparent message of encouragement to the first lady, who set social media abuzz when she departed Washington for Texas on Tuesday wearing black high heels.

At times, the crowds that showed up to see the first couple felt more like those that assemble at Trump’s political rallies. As the presidential motorcade pulled up to the Louisiana Air National Guard Armory in Lake Charles, some Trump supporters yelled at the press vans, “Fake news!”

Earlier Saturday, inside the Pearland church, Elaine Ybarra, 41, lifted her 10-year-old son Chris to see Trump. “He brings us prayers from around the world,” she said of the power of a presidential visit.

When Trump visited a middle-class neighborhood in the Houston area, where rotted mattresses, drywall and other debris sat piled up on the lawns of ranch houses, Trump told the residents, “These are people that have done a fantastic job holding it together.”

Talking to them in a cul-de-sac, Trump spotted a man in a red “Trump is my president” T-shirt and invited him to come forward for a photo. “You’re going to be famous now,” he told the man.

Alice Stewart, a Republican political consultant, watched Trump’s visit unfold on television and said she thought he “genuinely filled the role of consoler-in-chief.”

“Seeing the president and the first lady serving food, taking selfies, loading vehicles and offering hugs really demonstrated their compassion for those impacted by the storm,” Stewart said. “The optics of the visit are just as important as his actions on relief funds.”

Trump’s assessment of the recovery progress sounded at least slightly out of tune with the news reports coming out of the region. He boasted about floodwaters quickly receding — “the water’s disappearing,” he said — yet many neighborhoods remain uninhabitable.

He touted the $7.9 billion in disaster relief his administration is seeking — “It’s going through a very quick process,” he said — even though it could cost more than $100 billion to rebuild.

The budget Trump proposed, months before Harvey struck, would slash spending across the federal government, including for programs at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other departments that are designed to help communities such as those Trump visited on Saturday prepare for natural disasters.

And a couple of weeks before this hurricane, Trump reversed an Obama-era regulation that was designed to make federally funded infrastructure projects in coastal communities less vulnerable to flooding.

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said Trump’s past “anti-government rhetoric” makes it difficult for him to come across as authentic after Harvey.

“It is very hard for a president who has so often treated the federal government as his enemy, and who boasts of deliberately failing to fill high-level federal jobs, to suddenly go to suffering people in Texas and assure them that the federal government can effectively help them and he will make sure that it does,” Beschloss said.

Accompanying the Trumps on Saturday were four Cabinet members — Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and acting homeland security secretary Elaine Duke — who also mingled with storm victims and relief workers.

Jennifer Palmieri, a longtime Democratic strategist who advised President Barack Obama as he responded to natural disasters, said she does not think Trump fully grasps all of the dimensions at play in the Harvey recovery.

Palmieri mentioned Trump’s looming decision about the status of undocumented immigrants who are brought to the United States as children; the president is planning to announce by Tuesday whether the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program will be terminated.

“You can’t be dispensing hugs on Saturday and then rescind DACA for 124,000 Texans on Tuesday,” Palmieri said. “You can’t talk about how ‘happy’ everyone is in shelters and how well the federal efforts are going when the true federal effort in the form of FEMA recovery assistance hasn’t even begun.”

The brief encounters Trump had with storm victims seemed to consist of exchanging pleasantries, smiling for photos and sharing presidential words of encouragement. Trump also talked of his electoral victory, as he often does.

When Trump shook hands with a few uniformed military members at the evacuee shelter in Houston, one of the men told him, “We voted for you.”

“You better,” Trump said playfully. “Who didn’t in your world? Who didn’t?”