President Donald Trump will never be able to sell some form of the "Dreamers" act to his base of supporters unless Congress also approves funding for his U.S.-Mexico border wall, Bill O'Reilly tells Newsmax TV.
"No, and I don't think he'll even try. So, the wall is where you start," the veteran newsman and bestselling author of "Killing England: The Brutal Struggle for American Independence," said to John Bachman on "Newsmax Now."
"I assume [Congress will] agree to give some money to start the building or get the plans — you know how they are. But the wall has to be in play … [it is] certainly is going to help security."
O'Reilly said Trump has the figures to back up his longtime call for the wall.
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"If you look at the stats in the year that President Trump's been in office, the people trying to get in [to the United States] has fallen about, what, 49 percent, the border patrol said?" he told Bachman.
"So, just the inhibiting nature of Donald Trump's rhetoric has stopped a massive amount of people trying to get here. You put a wall up and that'll cut it down even further and the narcotics will be harder to bring across."
Congress is under pressure from Trump to hammer out a form of the rescinded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy (DACA) in which illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as kids could stay and have a path to citizenship.
But the commander-in-chief said he won't ink a DACA replacement without a wall funding.
This week, he noted that money from a renegotiation of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) could be used to help pay for the project.
"We make a good deal on NAFTA, and, say, I'm going to take a small percentage of that money and it's going toward the wall. Guess what? Mexico's paying," Trump said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, a federal judge late Tuesday barred Trump from ending DACA in response to a request by California and other plaintiffs that the program continue while their lawsuits play out in court.
The White House called the ruling "outrageous."