By Richard Cowan and James Oliphant
WASHINGTON, Jan 22 (Reuters) - In agreeing on Monday to end a three-day U.S. government shutdown, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer had to make a tough decision to bridge a divide within his own party over immigration, an issue on which Americans are deeply conflicted, according to new Reuters/Ipsos polling data.
Democratic leftists wanted Schumer to drive a harder bargain on helping the "Dreamers," young people brought to the United States illegally as children who face the threat of deportation under an order issued last year by Republican President Donald Trump.
But moderate Senate Democrats facing re-election challenges this year feared that prolonging the shutdown over the immigration issue would hurt them in November's congressional elections. In the end, Schumer sided with them.
By opting to placate senators crucial to his drive to seize control of the Senate from Republicans, Schumer angered the party's left, potentially complicating already difficult efforts to craft legislation to help the Dreamers.
His predicament underscored deep ambivalence among Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, on immigration.
Fifty-five percent of Americans in a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Monday said the government should not shut down, even if that means letting the Dreamers get deported.
At the same time, 87 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of Republicans said they supported the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program that protects the Dreamers from deportation. Trump announced in September that DACA would end in March.
Some 53 percent of those polled said they opposed Trump's central demand in the immigration battle, funding for a wall he wants to build along the U.S.-Mexico border.
In an example of hard-line views among many Republicans on immigration, Republican Senator Ted Cruz warned after the Senate vote on Monday to end the shutdown that it would be a "serious mistake" to provide "amnesty and a path to citizenship for millions of people here illegally."
MOST BLAME REPUBLICANS FOR SHUTDOWN
Republican attacks on Schumer's decision to couple a stopgap spending bill with immigration were “no doubt causing heartburn with some Democrats,” said Jim Manley, once a top aide to former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Still, Manley said, the Democratic stand on Dreamers had been effective and would play out in the party’s favor by energizing the party's base, something crucial in a year when voter turnout is lower than in presidential elections.