Dare to dream, Donald

Donald Trump just may be jettisoning one of the cruelest pledges of his campaign, which also happened to be one of his signature promises. Tempting though it may be to attack the shape-shifting President-elect for standing on a foundation of Jell-O, he deserves praise, not scorn, for seeming to shimmy away from plans to expel hundreds of thousands of young people who came to the United States as children, the so-called Dreamers.

Candidate Trump won primary votes by the millions in part because of his brash commitment to round up undocumented immigrants and get them “out of here so fast, your head will spin.”

For bad measure, Trump promised to “immediately terminate” President Obama’s 2012 executive action shielding Dreamers from deportation and giving them formal permission to stay and work — which has so far brought 750,000 people out of painful legal limbo. That was then. On Wednesday, Trump sang from a kinder, gentler songbook: “We’re going to work something out that’s going to make people happy and proud. They got brought here at a very young age, they’ve worked here, they’ve gone to school here. Some were good students. Some have wonderful jobs. And they’re in never-never land because they don’t know what’s going to happen.”

There’s no express commitment in those words to let Dreamers stay, but the President-elect is unmistakably signaling his desire to prevent a dark cloud of deportation from hanging over them.

Which either means letting Obama’s executive action remain in force and continuing to shield nearly a million people who came forward, turned personal information over to the federal government and went through background checks, or preparing out of the gate to champion — and sign — legislation doing the same.

Then, Trump needs to ensure that the humanity infused in his sane statement on Dreamers informs the rest of his immigration policies.

Millions of other law-abiding people, including the parents of Dreamers, are similarly consigned to never-never land. They too deserve sympathy from the man who not long ago promised to be deporter-in-chief.