President Donald Trump’s

Longtime Republican Anthony Suarez resigns from party

DACA decision has split Florida’s Republican Party, and it has even led to Orlando attorney Anthony Suarez publicly announcing that he will no longer identify with the GOP.

TALLAHASSEE — Orlando attorney Anthony Suarez stuck with the Republican Party through the election of Donald Trump, but the president’s decision to end a program allowing children brought to the U.S. illegally was the “final straw” for him.

He quit the party Tuesday in a letter to Orange County Republican Party chairman Lew Oliver and registered as an independent, a reflection of the growing schism between two wings of the GOP over immigration.

In a separate email to colleagues, Suarez said Trump’s decision to halt the program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals unless Congress acts to save it within six months, was akin to using beneficiaries as “hostages.”

It is “cynical and meanspirited,” he wrote. “These innocent children should not be played with or compromised.”

DACA was created by President Obama in 2012 via executive order. It granted deferral from deportation and work authorization to immigrants who were under 16 when they entered the country, if they entered the U.S. before June 15, 2007, and lived here continuously since then. The deferral was good for two years, then recipients could renew their status, but it was not permanent legal status.

There are about 800,000 residents with DACA status, including nearly 40,000 in Florida, the fifth-largest among states. If Congress doesn’t renew the program, their protection could expire in the coming years, putting them at risk of deportation.

Suarez, who served briefly in the Legislature in 1999 as a Democrat before switching parties in the 2000s and becoming active in Republican circles, has Puerto Rican heritage and so isn’t directly affected by illegal immigration debates. But he says Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric during the campaign and in office is driving Hispanics of all backgrounds away from the GOP, hurting its electoral chances in Central Florida.

“At this moment [the Republican Party] has no future in Orange County,” he said in an interview.

Trump’s message on DACA has been mixed. He had At-