Our view:
Only in the up-is-down, left-is-right world of the Trump administration does it make sense to claim that a policy that logically leads to the deportation of 800,000 young people to countries they left as children and likely have never so much as visited since “prevents human suffering.” That absurdity, on its face, is enough to bestow Alternative Fact of the Week honors on Attorney General Jeff Sessions for his explanation for President Donald Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. But wait, there’s more.
Mr. Sessions specifically suggested that DACA, which former President Barack Obama announced in June 2012, “contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences.” He was referring, apparently, to the spike in Central American children who were apprehended at the border in 2013 and 2014, but there’s little evidence that DACA had anything to do with it.
For starters, the eligibility criteria for DACA require applicants to have come to the United States before 2007 and to have lived here continuously ever since. The minors coming from Central America in the period Mr. Sessions referred to did not qualify. It is, of course, possible that tens of thousands of parents in places like Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador heard about DACA and decided to tear their families apart and send their children on an extremely dangerous journey to the United States without bothering to check on the details. Under this theory, one would have to assume that Central American parents are uncaring, stupid or both.
The more likely explanation, of course, is that those countries were so ravaged by gang violence at the time that parents believed their children were safer taking such an enormous and heart-wrenching risk than staying where they were.
Some evidence from the time suggests the existence of information being spread in those countries suggesting that unaccompanied minors would not be sent back if they came to the United States. There was actually some truth to that, but it had nothing to do with DACA. In 2008, a bipartisan majority in Congress passed, and then-President George W. Bush signed into law, the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Reautho-