President Trump ended DACA today (actually had his AG Jeff Sessions do the dirty work of announcing it). He is giving Congress 6 months to come up with a permanent solution. Then as a firestorm from churches, business leaders, advocacy groups, and protests erupted, he tweeted out at the end of the day he will take another look at it if Congress does not come up with a solution.
DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The program was created by President Obama by executive order. It allows undocumented immigrants that had been brought illegally to the USA by their parents, as kids under 16, to register, be background-checked, and recorded in a database. It costs $500 to register and allows the recipient to work legally. So one finds DACA recipients in tech companies, in the US Army, even working as first responders in the Hurricane Harvey crisis. They may have younger brothers and sisters that are US citizens (a person born in the USA is a US citizen). Does not matter. We will deport you now, to a foreign country you have never known. Critics say the DACA program is ‘unconstitutional’ since it was not established by Congress. But the US Supreme Court has ruled on it, and declared it constitutional. Trump the candidate was extremely critical of Obama establishing the program by executive action. But now that he is President, he does the exact reverse, by executive order. Is there any iota of a law or action of Obama’s that Trump will not reverse? Why are our immigration laws still such a mess, and so, so broken?