Trump team backs off vow to target ‘dreamers’

Children of undocumented immigrants are not at risk, cabinet members say

WASHINGTON— Two members of U.S. President Donald Trump’s cabinet appeared to retreat on Sunday from one of Trump’s signature campaign promises: to “immediately terminate” an Obama administration executive order meant to protect the legal status of children of undocumented immigrants.

“We’re not targeting them,” Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said of such children in an interview on CNN’s State of the Union.

In a separate interview, on ABC’s This Week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions affirmed that the federal government did not “have the ability to round up everybody.”

“These people are caught between the law,” Kelly said on CNN, adding that “the president obviously is sympathetic.”

“But,” he added, “I just wish these kind of issues were dealt with legally by the United States Congress.”

Sessions made a similar observation in the ABC interview.

On Friday, Trump told The Associated Press that undocumented immigrants brought here as children can “rest easy,” and that his agenda was “not after the dreamers; we are after the criminals.”

Trump had a more nationalist posture during the campaign. “I want dreamers to come from this country,” he said in February 2016. “We’re always talking about dreamers for other people. I want the children that are growing up in the United States to be dreamers also.”

The Trump administration has continued to issue work permits to dreamers, but it also has moved to hasten the hiring of border agents. And the Justice Department recently sent letters to officials in jurisdictions known as sanctuary cities, threatening them with the loss of federal aid if they failed to co-operate with federal immigration officials.

On Sunday, Kelly and Sessions also addressed the accompanying problem of financing a wall on the Mexican border that Trump has vowed to build. The current congressional funding bill expires Friday, and Trump has made the wall a fulcrum of his new budget proposals.

Republicans from areas where the wall would be built appear hesitant about Trump’s plans to pay for it. A survey last week by the Wall Street Journal found that the $1.4-billion price tag for the first portion of the wall is not supported by any member of Congress who represents territory along the southwest border.