The Democrat-controlled Senate was nearing a make-or-break vote on a comprehensive immigration bill in June 2013 when a pair of Republican senators swooped in with an 11th-hour amendment aimed at clinching enough GOP support to avoid a filibuster.

A key provision: Doubling the length of a new border “fence” between the United States and Mexico from 350 miles to 700 miles.

Democrats didn’t think such a barrier was necessary. Neither did the Obama White House. To them, the proposal seemed arbitrary — a random doubling of the size at the last minute for political purposes. In the end, though, all 54 Democrats in the Senate supported the provision in hopes of realizing a bigger goal — providing a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants.

This month, President Trump is ratcheting up demands that Congress include his border wall in a package to provide legal status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. The administration is preparing to ask for $18 billion over a decade to renovate and build a total of 700 miles of wall along the southwest border, according to a memo from the Department of Homeland Security.

Lawmakers face a March 5 deadline, set by Trump, after which work permits for the undocumented “dreamers” provided by former president Barack Obama under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program will begin to expire at a rate of nearly 1,000 per day.

But the debate illustrates how the political stakes have shifted since Trump took office.

Democrats, under pressure from immigrant rights groups, have strenuously opposed including Trump’s wall in the negotiations. They call it a waste of taxpayer money, but they also have signaled that the political price for helping the president make good on his prime campaign promise is far too high.

Trump, through his anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, including a travel ban aimed at Muslim-majority countries, has made the wall a metaphor to many Democrats of an administration whose crackdown on immigration has overtones of xenophobia or racism.

“The debate over a wall goes back decades. The notion of a wall is a giant symbol that is not based on analysis in any way of whether we should do something about the border,” said Cecilia Muñoz, a longtime immigrant rights advocate who served as Obama’s domestic policy adviser. “The fact is, having elevated the notion of a wall in his campaign the way he did, the president made it an even bigger symbol than it already was — and that makes it much harder to accomplish.”

In a letter to colleagues Friday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the Trump administration’s request for wall funding “alarming” and said her caucus “must all speak out.”

On the other side of the debate, wall proponents are perplexed why Democrats are voicing such vociferous opposition.

In 2006, President George W. Bush signed into law the Secure Fence Act, a bill that authorized the construction of hundreds of miles of fencing along the border. That legislation was approved with broad bipartisan support, including, in the Senate, by such Democratic luminaries as Barack Obama (Ill.), Hillary Clinton (N.Y.), Joe Biden (Del.) and Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), now the Senate minority leader.

A look at Trump’s border wall prototypes View Graphic A look at Trump’s border wall prototypes

“Where I don’t understand the pushback is, in 2013 if everybody was for the 700 miles of double fencing, but now they’re not for it because Trump calls it a wall — to me that does not make sense,” said Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the labor union for the border patrol agents. “Whether we call it a fence or call it a wall, it acts as the exact same thing — a physical barrier that makes it more difficult to enter the United States illegally. I don’t understand the whole fight over this.”

In a statement, Schumer said, “We’d be glad to do comprehensive immigration reform, like the Senate bill from 2013, that has more of what both sides want, but that will take time. There is an immediate need to protect the DACA recipients, so the deal will be more narrow than that.”

It’s not just the wall that has scrambled the debate. Trump also is demanding changes to the nation’s legal immigration system, including curbing what the president calls “chain migration” — the practice of immigrants petitioning for extended family members to enter the country — and terminating a diversity visa lottery that provides 55,000 green cards to people from countries with low immigration rates to the United States.

The 2013 immigration bill approved by the Senate — with 14 Republicans joining the 54 Democrats — included provisions to end that lottery and to eliminate the ability of brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens to enter the country on family reunification visas. That bill also created a new category of “merit-based” visas in which prospective immigrants were awarded points for education levels and work expertise — another concept Trump has championed.

Democrats insist it is not fair to compare the 2013 debate to the current one. Five years ago, the negotiations were aimed at a far more sweeping comprehensive bill to fix an immigration system both parties agreed was broken. That legislation included changes to worker visas, cleared lengthy backlogs in legal immigration waiting lists, and offered a path to citizenship for all of the nation’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants.

This year, the debate centers on the fate of a far smaller group. Nearly 700,000 dreamers were enrolled in the DACA program, started by Obama in 2012, when Trump terminated it in September. Not all dreamers had applied for the program, however, and all told, depending on how the group is defined, there could be a total of more than 1.5 million dreamers in the country, according to experts.

Democrats have eyed a Jan. 19 deadline for lawmakers to approve a must-pass spending bill as leverage to forge a narrow deal for some portion or all of this group.

Trump signaled last fall that, although he was adamant that lawmakers beef up border security, funding for a wall did not have to be tied to the dreamer issue. In recent months, however, the president has emphasized that any DACA legislation “must secure the border with a wall,” as he reiterated Thursday.

Lawmakers remain uncertain about exactly what Trump is asking for. During the campaign, he called for a contiguous wall along 2,000 miles of the border, something even the Border Patrol union does not think is necessary.

After meeting with Trump at the White House on Thursday, Republican senators said such talk is misguided

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said that despite the president’s past campaign rhetoric, “he’s listened to border security” experts and now believes “there’s a need for walls and barriers in a number of places and the use of technology and personnel in others.”

Ultimately, Tillis said, Republicans are hoping for “a net increase of 600 miles of wall. That will be varying barriers based on where you are along the border, but that’s the long-term view.”

Democrats said privately that they need to hear directly from the White House just what Trump is proposing. Illegal crossings into the United States at the Mexican border have plummeted under Trump, making the need for a wall even less urgent in the mind of many lawmakers.

“If they’re really thinking that to give dreamers relief . . . that we’re going to give them significant monies towards a border wall,” Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) told reporters last month, “I can’t see that.”

Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), whose Harlem-area district is home to approximately 2,700 constituents currently protected by DACA, called a wall a “nonstarter” in the dreamer negotiations.

Caving on a wall or on curbs to legal immigration in order to protect the dreamers is a wildly lopsided trade-off in favor of immigration hawks, Democrats said. Polls show that upward of 80 percent of the public favors a solution to allow dreamers to remain in the country, and some Republican lawmakers have said they support a deal — highlighting the complex politics for the GOP in a midterm-election year.

“This is a crisis they’ve created,” said Lorella Praeli, a former dreamer who became a U.S. citizen in 2015 and served as campaign adviser to Hillary Clinton. She now works as the ACLU’s director of immigration and campaigns.

Praeli said the Democratic strategy of supporting the border fence in 2013 in hopes that it would give the comprehensive immigration bill a better chance at becoming law was a mistake. The bill also would have spent $40 billion on border security, including nearly doubling the number of Border Patrol agents to 40,000 and adding high-tech surveillance equipment.

Although the Senate approved the bill by a 68-32 vote, it died in the Republican-controlled House where immigration hard-liners — opposed to granting “amnesty” to undocumented immigrants — forced then-Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio) into shelving the legislation.

“They did the best they could under the context and politics at the time, but immigration politics have changed,” Praeli said. “There is a robust movement and accountability on Republicans and Democrats. Given the support on this issue and our constituency, we do not want to end up being in a situation where we say, ‘Sure, take what you need to give us a solution’ ” on the dreamers.

President Trump’s Twitter feed is photographed on a computer screen in Washington on April 3. (J. David Ake/AP)

Some Twitter users have called, repeatedly, for the social network to block President Trump’s account — but a new statement from Twitter essentially says that is not going to happen.

Twitter has previously responded to complaints about Trump’s account by saying that certain users’ tweets have a “newsworthiness” value that makes it important to stay online and inform the network’s global conversation. Its Friday statement expanded on that idea, though this latest explanation did not mention Trump by name.

“Elected world leaders play a critical role in that conversation because of their outsized impact on our society,” the post said.  “Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate. It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”

Trump critics have pointed out many instances where it seems as though the president has violated Twitter’s terms of service with his messages. Most recently, Trump’s comments about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and the respective sizes of North Korea and the United States’ “nuclear buttons” drew a fresh round of calls to censor his account.

North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2018

[The 3 loopholes that keep Trump’s tweets on Twitter]

Protesters this week projected messages on Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco after the North Korea tweets, saying that either Trump or chief executive Jack Dorsey “must go.”

Protesters gather outside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, and project messages on the building. (Geoffrey A. Fowler/The Washington Post)

Twitter’s attempt to handle political speech on its site — and defining when and how that overlaps with violent speech — has been a long and often confusing process. The company also introduced new policies last month that specifically exempted “military or government” groups from its policies prohibiting accounts that “use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes.” But even with Twitter’s latest clarifications, questions remain about how it defines and reviews political figures.

For example, Twitter in November declined to remove videos that Trump retweeted that were originally shared by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of a far-right group in Britain called Britain First. Twitter declined to take the videos down from Trump’s account — saying first that they were newsworthy, and then clarifying that they did not violate its policies.

But in December, Twitter deleted Fransen’s entire account, apparently as part of its crackdown on violent extremist groups. The videos disappeared from Trump’s when Fransen’s account was deleted.

It’s also not clear if there is an instance in which Twitter would remove a world leader’s messages or account.

“We review tweets by leaders within the political context that defines them, and enforce our rules accordingly,” the post said. “No one person’s account drives Twitter’s growth or influences these decisions. We work hard to remain unbiased with the public interest in mind.”

Twitter declined to elaborate on its blog post.

On Thursday morning, Frank Cerabino, a columnist for the Palm Beach Post, woke up to 40-degree weather and was greeted by a “frozen iguana” lounging by his pool in Boca Raton.

He responded as many people probably would: He shared a photo on social media. Then he pondered, “What do you do?” he told the New York Times.

One of the strongest winter storms on the East Coast in modern history has pummeled cities with snow and sleet, forcing schools and businesses to close while grounding thousands of flights.

And in South Florida, it is “raining iguanas.”

Green iguanas, like all reptiles, are coldblooded animals, so they become immobile when the temperature falls to a certain level, said Kristen Sommers of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Under 50 degrees Fahrenheit, they become sluggish. Under 40 degrees, their blood stops moving as much, Sommers said.

They like to sit in trees, and “it’s become cold enough that they fall out.”

This is not a new phenomenon — there were similar reports in 2008 and 2010 — though it is not typical.

“The reality is South Florida doesn’t get that cold very often or long enough that you see this frequently,” Sommers said.

But what should one do with a fallen iguana?

[ Post Nation ‘Bomb cyclone’ batters Northeast with snow and ice, grounding thousands of flights ]

Cerabino told the New York Times that he prodded the iguana with a pool skimmer.

“He didn’t move,” Mr. Cerabino said. “But he’s probably still alive. My experience is that they take a while to die.”

Maxine Bentzel, a reporter at CBS12 News, suggested that “iguanas have a good chance of thawing out if you move them into the sun.”

The experts would prefer you didn’t.

Sommers said the reptiles could become frightened as they warm.

“Like any wild animal, it will try to defend itself,” she said.

[ Historic ‘bomb cyclone’ unleashes blizzard conditions from coastal Virginia to New England. Frigid air to follow. ]

And there are cautionary tales.

Ron Magill of the Miami Zoo told WPLG TV in 2010 about a man who collected sleeping iguanas and threw them into the back of his station wagon. Then they awoke.

“All of a sudden these things are coming alive, crawling on his back and almost caused a wreck.”

The situation was much worse for iguanas in 2010, when temperatures in South Florida fell to the low 30s, the Sun Sentinel reported.

“Neighborhoods resounded with the thud of iguanas dropping from trees onto patios and pool decks,” Sun Sentinel reporter David Fleshler wrote.

Many iguanas died that year, as did other animals.

“Many pythons were reported dead, floating in the Everglades,” the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said in a statement to the Palm Beach Post.

The deaths resulted from both the low temperatures and the length of time of the frigid weather.

The iguana population has since recovered, to the consternation of residents.

“We have been receiving more calls from people that are experiencing wildlife conflicts with iguanas. … Iguanas in their yard that they are not happy about, you’ve seen them further north in large numbers,” Sommers said.

[ People are leaving dogs to freeze to death in the bitter cold ]

According to the Sun Sentinel, iguanas arrived in Florida as pets, and once they escaped or were freed by their owners, first moved into Miami-Dade County in 1966, then to the Keys in 1995, before making a home of Broward County in 2001 and in Palm Beach in 2003.

The winter storm sweeping across parts of the East Coast has prompted animal rescue organizations and local authorities to issue warnings about giving pets shelter, with dogs left out to freeze to death in the cold.

In South Florida, the cooler temperatures also affect sea turtles, manatees and other animals. 

“Bats sometimes will fall out of the roost of trees when we have a pretty cold snap,” Sommers said.

Sommers said that while she’s heard of falling iguanas on social media, the agency hasn’t gotten any reports.

“There have not been an influx of calls to FWC about people worried about iguanas falling out of trees,” she said. “It’s not like something you see every year.”

But this is no ordinary weather.

On Thursday, the National Weather Service issued a freeze warning for parts of South Florida. According to the Sun Sentinel, temperatures in the area will be the coldest since the cold snap in December 2010.

Read more:

People are leaving dogs to freeze to death in the bitter cold

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How climate change could counterintuitively feed winter storms

Everyone seems to be hiring. But not everywhere. (Photo by Logan Cyrus for The Washington Post)

The U.S. economy added 148,000 jobs in December after a year of steady hiring, missing expectations for a larger last-minute surge, the government reported Friday.

The unemployment rate stayed at 4.1 percent last month, the lowest point since 2001. Wages continued their slow climb, rising by 9 cents to $26.63. That’s a 2.5 percent increase since December 2016 (and still below pre-recession levels).

President Trump’s first year in the White House brought healthy growth and 2.1 million new jobs, a slight drop from 2.2 million positions created during Obama’s last year in office, government estimates showed Friday.

The average number of jobs employers added each month in 2017 was 173,000, compared to the previous year’s 187,000.

One dark spot was retail, which lost 20,000 jobs in December, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. About 67,000 positions vanished from stores in 2017, a sharp reversal from the 203,000 jobs that were added in 2016.

“That’s a notoriously volatile number around the holiday season, but it also reflects in part that increasing number of sales are coming from e-commerce and not brick and mortar stores,” said David Berson, chief economist at Nationwide. “That’s part of a longer term decline in that sector.”

Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta said in a statement Friday that the December report reflected “steady growth.”

“With President Trump signing tax reform into law, 2018 will continue last year’s successes and, we hope, bring needed increases in wages and labor force participation,” he said. “Job creation, wage growth, and retirement savings drive prosperity and financial security.  Strong growth in all is necessary.”

Manufacturing saw strong gains in December, adding 25,000 jobs. The industry generated 196,000 jobs last year, compared to a loss of 16,000 positions in 2016.

Analysts had predicted between 200,000 and 250,000 new positions would be created in December.

“It’s certainly disappointing, but we’re still topping off a strong year for job creation, said Mike Loewengart, vice of president of investment strategy at E*TRADE, a financial services company in New York.

The BLS report still sends a promising message to job seekers: Employers will be increasingly desperate for your applications in 2018. And while wages stayed flat in 2017, the unemployment rate sank at a faster pace, which gives economists hope that raises are on the horizon.

“There’s almost one job open for every unemployed person,” said Dan North, chief economist at Euler Hermes North America, a credit insurance firm.

There are now six million vacancies in the United States and 6.6 million unemployed people, to be more precise. From January to November, the economy added 1.9 million jobs.

However, companies nationwide keep struggling to fill roles, citing tight labor markets, retiring baby boomers and failed drug tests. Factories, hospitals, contractors and eateries, among other employers, face this trouble.

“Restaurants are finding it extremely challenging to find workers,” Sonia Riggs, president and chief executive of the Colorado Restaurant Association, said in an email. “Many have even eliminated drug testing because finding employees is so difficult.”

Employers increasingly are turning to on-the-job training to find and retain employees — but that could be keeping wages down.

“In manufacturing and metals, especially, employers have been saying to me, ‘I could grow faster if I could find somebody, anybody,’ ” said North, the economist. “They’ll hire whoever they can find, pay them a low wage and train them up.”

Roughly 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 each day, and not enough young workers are cycling in to replace them.

One forecast from Goldman Sachs predicted the figure will dip to 3.5 percent by the end of next year, the lowest since 1969.

“Such a scenario would take the U.S. labor market into territory almost never seen outside of a major wartime mobilization,” Goldman Sachs chief economist Jan Hatzius wrote in November.

Economists can’t agree on why wages haven’t lifted with the demand for workers. As paid training spreads and more workers master skills that boost their productivity, paychecks should grow too, as companies compete for workers, said Josh Wright, chief economist at iCIMS, a hiring software company.

“We’ll see more turnover,” he said. “Employers will be poaching more workers, and if workers feel undervalued, thinking, ‘I should have gotten that raise,’ they’re going to make a move.”

That could be especially true in health care, which drove much of the job growth in 2017 and doesn’t appear to be slowing down.

Nurses, physician assistants, home health aides and physical therapists are among the country’s fastest-growing jobs as the population ages.

While manufacturing has enjoyed a four-month growth streak, reaching an eight-year high in November (125,000 jobs), analysts expect the sector to remain a sliver of the economy, compared to service-based work.

But the hiring blitz hasn’t touched every corner of the country. West Virginia, where mining jobs have faded in recent decades, still has one of the highest jobless rates in the country (5.3 percent), and Ohio, which was hit hard by the manufacturing downturn, continues to grapple with a higher-than-average share of unemployed people (4.8 percent).

“We can’t just say everything is roses,” said Robert Frick, corporate economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union.

People in areas where opportunities have declined are showing less desire to pack up and leave. In 2017, only 11.2 percent of Americans relocated, the smallest share since the Census began tracking it in 1948.  Of those who moved, fewer than a fifth said they left for an employment-related reason.

Read more:

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How poor, decaying Gary, Ind., is fighting to win Amazon’s heart

‘Look, I can quit’: Why Target is giving workers a big raise

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is rescinding an Obama-era directive that discouraged enforcement of federal marijuana laws in states that had legalized the substance, according to people familiar with the decision.

The move potentially paves the way for the federal government to crack down on the burgeoning pot industry — though the precise impact remains to be seen. Marijuana already was illegal under U.S. law, even as federal prosecutors had been advised against bringing cases involving it in states that approved its use and sale.

The people who described Sessions’s decision, first reported by the Associated Press, spoke on the condition of anonymity. A formal announcement was expected later Thursday.

[Jeff Sessions’s war on drugs has medical marijuana advocates worried]

Eight states and the District of Columbia have laws allowing for personal pot consumption, according to NORML, a group which advocates legalization and tracks pot-related legislation.

Sessions’s Justice Department has long taken a hard line stance against marijuana, even effectively blocking the Drug Enforcement Administration from taking action on more than two dozen requests to grow marijuana to use in research. Sessions has said in the past that he did not believe marijuana should be legalized, even suggesting at an appearance last year that medical marijuana had been “hyped, maybe too much.” He and top Justice Department officials had long been reviewing the 2013 guidance from then Deputy Attorney James Cole directing federal prosecutors to effectively back off marijuana enforcement in states that had legalized the substance and had a system in place to regulate it.

In practice, that meant U.S. attorneys in jurisdictions that had legalized marijuana at the state level were often reluctant to bring marijuana cases — though Cole’s memo stressed that Congress had determined it to be an illegal drug that provided significant revenue to gangs. They might now be more willing to consider such prosecutions — though they will still potentially have to contend with jurors sympathetic to defendants whose conduct would not be illegal under state law.

Pro-marijuana advocates have long been critical of Sessions’s views on the topic, though his latest directive might also upset those in his own party. Asked by a Colorado TV station in 2016 about using federal authority to shut down sales of recreational marijuana, President Trump said, “I wouldn’t do that, no,” but he was noncommittal on whether he would block his attorney general from doing so.

Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) said on Twitter that the move “directly contradicts what Attorney General Sessions told me prior to his confirmation.”

“With no prior notice to Congress, the Justice Department has trampled on the will of the voters in CO and other states,” he wrote. “I am prepared to take all steps necessary, including holding DOJ nominees, until the Attorney General lives up to the commitment he made to me prior to his confirmation.”

[How a Maryland bank is quietly solving the marijuana industry’s cash problem]

Sessions’s move could have significant economic impacts, injecting even more uncertainty into investors already apprehensive about what the Justice Department might do when it comes to legal pot.

“If the Trump administration goes through with a crackdown on states that have legalized marijuana, they will be taking billions of dollars away from regulated, state-sanctioned businesses and putting that money back into the hands of drug cartels,” said NORML Political Director Justin Strekal.

Some pro-pot advocates, too, sought to cast the move as a continuation of Sessions’s war on drugs. Early in his tenure, he reversed another Obama-era directive and instructed prosecutors to pursue the most serious, readily provable charge — even if that might trigger stiff mandatory minimum penalties for drug crimes.