DACA ‘dead,’ Trump insists

President continues to lash out at Democrats, Mexico

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump declared on Monday that a program shielding a group of young people from deportation — which he moved to scrap last fall — is “dead,” and then blamed Democrats for failing to salvage the protections.

“DACA is dead because the Democrats didn’t care or act, and now everyone wants to get onto the DACA bandwagon,” Trump said in one of a series of morning tweets on the matter. It was his second consecutive day of using Twitter to rail against the Deferred Action for Childhood

Arrivals program, charging that it was being exploited amid lax border security.

Trump administration officials said Monday they’re crafting a new legislative package aimed at closing immigration “loopholes,” hours after the president called on Republicans in Congress to immediately pass a border bill using the “Nuclear Option if necessary” to muscle it through. The House and the Senate — both controlled by Republicans — are in recess and return next week.

“Border Patrol Agents (and ICE) are GREAT, but the weak Dem laws don’t allow them to do their job. Act now Congress, our country is being stolen!” Trump wrote in a series of tweets after returning from a holiday weekend spent in Florida.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday that the president had made offers about the immigration policy.

“He wanted to see something get done, and Democrats refused to actually put something on the table or work with the president to get anything done,” Sanders

said. “They wanted to use DACA recipients as political pawns.”

Later, surrounded by children on the South Lawn of the White House for the annual Easter Egg Roll festivities, Trump lashed out again about the program, saying that Democrats had abandoned the young people who were brought to the United States illegally as children and have benefited from DACA.

“The Democrats have really let them down, they’ve really let them down,” Trump said in response to a question shouted by a reporter.

The president was referring to the failure of bipartisan talks to enshrine DACA’s protections in law. The negotiations became necessary after Trump moved last fall to end the program, which had been created unilaterally by former President Barack Obama. Courts have blocked his decision to end the program.

Those deliberations have gone nowhere despite Trump’s stated willingness to provide a path to citizenship for nearly 2 million people who could be considered eligible for the program. Democrats offered last month to provide $25 billion for the border wall that Trump advocates, in exchange for such an extension, but White House officials rejected the deal.

Democrats said Monday that he was deliberately misrepresenting the issue.

“Instead of working productively to find a bipartisan solution for Dreamers, the president is attempting to rewrite history with a dangerous, anti-immigrant gaslighting campaign aimed at confusing the American people, slandering the DACA program and disparaging asylum seekers,” said Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, D-N.M. and the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

But in referring to people “taking advantage of DACA,” his advisers said, the president was also alluding to a misperception perpetrated by human smugglers that Congress may soon agree to legislation that allows people who cross illegally into the United States to remain without consequences, even though the scrapped program was never open to new arrivals.

’97 COURT SETTLEMENT

Among the measures in the immigration package: ending special safeguards that prevent the immediate deportation of children arrested at the border and traveling alone. Under current law, unaccompanied children from countries that don’t border the U.S. would be placed under the supervision of the Department of Health and Human Services and undergo often-lengthy deportation proceedings before an immigration judge instead of being deported.

The administration is also pushing Congress to terminate a 1997 court settlement that requires the government to release children from custody to parents, adult relatives or other caretakers as their cases make their way through immigration court. Officials complain that many children never show up at their hearings.

Another senior off icial outlined modifications Trump wants to see in asylum policies to limit the number of people claiming to be political refugees who can apply for protection in the United States.

Among the changes would be making it more difficult for asylum seekers to demonstrate “credible fear” about returning to their home countries before they are given a chance to stay in the United States and adding more reasons — such as membership in a gang or drunken driving accusations — that asylum seekers could be deemed inadmissible.

A senior administration official who detailed the asylum changes said they were meant in part to address a backlog of hundreds of thousands of immigration court cases that can delay hearings for years, allowing unauthorized immigrants to be released for long periods and to live legally in the United States while they await decisions on their cases.

As part of that effort, the Justice Department told immigration judges Monday that it would impose new quotas on their work, requiring them to complete 700 cases each year in an effort to speed deportation decisions and eliminate the backlog. That is a slight increase from the average of 678 cases a year the judges completed from 2011 to 2016.

STOP THE FLOW

Trump spent part of his Easter Sunday complaining on Twitter about “caravans” of immigrants heading north toward the U.S.-Mexico border after Fox News Channel reported on a group of hundreds of Central Americans that has been traveling through Mexico toward the United States, where some hope to seek asylum or sneak across the border.

On Monday, Trump again referred to “large ‘Caravans’ of people” headed toward the United States, and repeated his calls for Mexico to enforce border security laws and prevent people from coming to the United States illegally.

“They must stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA. Need wall!” he wrote, with some words in all capital letters. “With all of the money they make from the U.S., hopefully they will stop people from coming through their country and into ours.”

Mexico’s interior secretary, Alfonso Navarrete Prida, rejected such pressure.

“We will act with complete sovereignty in enforcing our laws,” Navarrete Prida said Monday.

About 1,100 migrants, many from Honduras, have been marching along roadsides and train tracks in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.

These “Stations of the Cross” migrant caravans have been held in southern Mexico for at least the past five years, as an Easter-season protest against the kidnappings, extortion, beatings and killings suffered by many Central American migrants as they cross Mexico.

They had stopped to camp out in a field in Oaxaca on Monday. Most of the group is probably going to take buses to the last scheduled stop for the caravan, a migrant rights symposium in central Puebla state.

Irineo Mujica, director of Pueblo Sin Fronteras, the activist group behind the annual symbolic event, said the caravan would continue only to the city of Puebla southeast of Mexico City, “but not in a massive way.” Mujica said about 300 to 400 of the migrants say they have relatives living in Mexico and so may consider staying there at least temporarily.

In a statement late Monday, Mexico’s government said about 400 participants in the caravan had already been sent back to their home countries. “Under no circumstances does the Mexican government promote irregular migration,” the Interior Ministry statement said.

It noted that Mexico considers the annual caravans to be “a public demonstration that seeks to call attention to the migration phenomenon and the importance of respecting the rights of Central Americans.”

The department also said that unlike in previous years of the caravan, “this time Mexican immigration authorities have offered refugee status” to participants who qualify. But it suggested it is not up to Mexico to keep people from going to the U.S. to apply for asylum.

Navarette Prida had said earlier that he talked with Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, on Monday. “We agreed to analyze the best means to handle flows of migration, in accordance with each country’s laws,” Prida wrote in his Twitter account.

Nielsen later tweeted that their talk was focused specifically on the caravan. “Working with Mexican officials to address the yearly illegal alien caravan. Exploring all options,” she wrote.