US PRESIDENT DONALD Trump has hit out at top Democrat Nancy Pelosi after she rejected a deal on immigration and the Mexico border wall that would end a 30-day-old government shutdown.

Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, yesterday called Trump’s offer of temporary protections for about a million immigrants in return for $5.7 billion to fund the wall a “non-starter”.

Trump has offered three years of legislative relief for 700,000 young immigrants brought to the US illegally as children in exchange for $5.7 billion of funding for the US-Mexico border wall. He said this extension will give them protection from deportation.  

“Nancy Pelosi has behaved so irrationally & has gone so far to the left that she has now officially become a Radical Democrat,” Trump tweeted.

“She is so petrified of the ‘lefties’ in her party that she has lost control.”

“…And by the way, clean up the streets in San Francisco, they are disgusting!” he added, in a seemingly gratuitous aside. Pelosi is from San Francisco.

The offer also was assailed by prominent anti-immigrant voices, which denounced it as tantamount to amnesty.

“No, Amnesty is not a part of my offer. It is a 3-year extension of DACA,” Trump said in another tweet, referring to former president Barack Obama’s program to shield undocumented immigrants who entered the country as children.

Besides the 700,000 immigrants already enrolled in the so-called DACA or “Dreamers” programme, Trump’s proposal would also extend to another 300,000 people who had been protected from deportation under another programme.

He said that while there would be “no big push” to remove the 11 million people in the country illegally, he warned: ‘but be careful, Nancy!” 

The federal government has been shuttered for four weeks over Trump‘s insistence that a wider federal budget measure include billions of dollars for a border wall – and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to go along.

The shutdown is now the longest in the country’s history – and there is no sign of a compromise.

The standoff has left about 800,000 federal employees either sent home or, if their jobs are deemed “essential,” working without pay. 

All are expected to receive back wages once the shutdown ends, but in the meantime, many have had difficulty paying bills or even feeding their families.

Vice President Mike Pence, who has been leading the administration’s contacts with members of Congress, said a bill with the president’s proposal would be introduced in the Republican-controlled Senate as early as Tuesday.

With reporting by AP

© – AFP 2019