Most everyone’s heard of the oath given at trials that compels a witness to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” It should be noted that the oath purposely distinguishes the gulf between “the truth” and the “whole truth.” That’s because, in many cases, a partial truth is also a partial lie.
This is exactly the case with the all-too-common assertion that Sen. Chuck Schumer once offered President Trump $25 billion in border wall funds in exchange for legalizing the nation’s roughly 1.8 million DACA recipients and 3.5 million Dreamers, but the White House opposed it. Well, that’s the truth, but it is certainly far from the whole truth. And as the Yiddish proverb says, “A half-truth is a whole lie.”
The actual measure put forth by Schumer’s office in February 2018 offered the wall money in exchange for the aforementioned amnesty, but then the senator’s staff inserted a hand-written provision that would have restricted immigration enforcement. This exclusively protected violent criminals and terrorists while also – and this is an enormous “also” – instituted an official enforcement holiday – amnesty – at the border and in the interior of the nation for any and everyone who would arrive in the U.S. in the following five months, through June 2018.
Had the president agreed to this, it would have created an amnesty loophole large enough to drive a bus through and would have triggered a caravan from Central America that would have dwarfed anything we can imagine. Of course the president, or anyone who cares about immigration enforcement or public safety in this country, rejected the sneaky offer. And Schumer’s staff knew they would.
