Several news reports indicate that Donald Trump and his senior advisers met Sunday afternoon to discuss dismantling a federal program that allows undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country as children to legally work, destroying yet another one of former President Barack Obama’s signature actions, and dabbing to Trump’s racist base.
Ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program—or DACA—would affect more than 800,000 undocumented immigrants, and Trump is expected to make an official announcement Tuesday.
After some waffling, the president—on the advice of Attorney General Jeff Sessions—has decided to scrap DACA but delay any action for six months, punting the actual legislation to Congress, Politico reports.
Sessions and others have long believed that DACA is unconstitutional because Obama implemented it as an administrative decree, and it was never approved by Congress.
Reaction to Trump’s pending announcement was swift, including statements from social justice orgs, social media and industry leaders such as Apple CEO Tim Cook, who noted on Twitter that 250 Apple employees are “Dreamers,” a reference to the proposed, but never approved, DREAM Act that offered some of the same protections for young people brought to the U.S. as children without documentation, as DACA did.
After the presidential election, the man with two faces said that young immigrants “shouldn’t be very worried.” But given that more than a few have been arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and are now facing deportation, it’s clear that their sojourn has been a perilous one ever since Trump took office.
As Daily Beast reporter Betsy Woodruff notes, young people covered under DACA shared sensitive information when applying for the program—information that can now be used against them.
And in this heartbreaking thread, Dreamer Juan Escalante showed just what an emotionally fraught ordeal this has been and continues to be:
As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) notes, the fight must be taken to Congress to save this humane status for children and young adults.
And given that many prominent legislators, such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), have indicated that they support DACA, there may, in fact, be a fight after all.
#DefendDreamers.