Ryan: Shame
Says Don shouldn’t boot immig Dreamers
PRESIDENT TRUMP said Friday he’ll make a decision on a program that protects so-called Dreamers from deportation “sometime today, or over the weekend.”
“We love the Dreamers. We love everybody,” the President told reporters during an unrelated event.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said a short time later that the announcement would come Tuesday about the fate of those in Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
The fuzzy timeline comes as the White House faces pressure from 10 states that plan to challenge the measure, whose participants are often called Dreamers, on Sept. 5.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) earlier in the day said Trump should hold off on doing anything.
“I actually don't think he should do that,” Ryan told the WCLO radio station in his hometown, Janesville, Wis. “I believe that this is something that Congress has to fix.”
The program shields undocumented immigrants who are below a certain age from being deported under special criteria.
Among the rules, they must not have been convicted of a felony or a major misdemeanor.
Ryan, speaking with WCLO, slammed former President Barack Obama for implementing the policy through executive power instead of the legislature. But he acknowledged, there was a bigger issue that had to be fixed.
“President Obama does not have the authority to do what he did . . . we’ve made that very clear,” said Ryan, who worked on immigration reform before becoming speaker in 2015. “Having said all of that, there are people who are in limbo.”
“These are kids who know no other country, who were brought here by their parents and don’t know another home,” the speaker continued. “I believe that there needs to be a legislative solution.”
Nearly 787,600 eligible undocumented immigrants have been approved from the program’s start in June 2012 to this March, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
They have to reapply to maintain their status every two years.
One option considered by the White House is to let existing Dreamers keep their status, but not get a renewal when it’s up, McClatchy reported Thursday.
While Democrats have urged the President not to end the program, other Republicans are speaking out as well.
Besides Ryan, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) issued a statement saying repealing the Dream Act “would further complicate a system in serious need of a permanent, legislative solution.”