Editorial

Thrashing DACA on Easter after failing to lead on immigration

During one of the holiest weekends of the year, President Donald Trump, dogged by criticism from immigration hardliners and needing to distract public attention away from reports about his porno ex-girlfriends, decided Easter morning was the perfect time to return to his bigoted anti-immigrant tirades.

“NO MORE DACA DEAL!” Trump tweeted. With consistent typography, the president also argued: “NEED WALL!”

It wasn’t so long ago that the Republican president accused Democrats in Congress of using DACA recipients as political pawns, tweeting in early March that Democrats “just don’t care. Where are they? We are ready to make a deal!”

Sunday and again Monday the beleaguered president, who has been all over the place on what to do about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, decided to use the hundreds of thousands of law-abiding young people as pawns of his own. He conflated fears of illegal border crossings with the stalemate over how to deal with DACA and pronounced the program dead, though of course courts have so far ruled against him on the matter.

For good measure, Trump heaped scorn on Mexico and threatened to pull out of efforts to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, which would create enormous economic headaches and challenges for our state and national businesses and hurt consumers. He argued that entire caravans of immigrants were en route, based on a report that a caravan of mostly Hondurans was generating publicity as it makes its way through Mexico. Members of the tour, organized for protection against violent gangs, say they hope to seek asylum here or attempt sneaking across the border.

We join the president in opposing illegal border crossings. We would remind him that bipartisan efforts were afoot to preserve DACA, rein in immigration programs Trump opposes and provide money to shore up the border.

But attacking DACA in relation to the caravan misses the point in other ways. The program’s protections don’t apply to newcomers. Instead, DACA protects the hundreds of thousands of young people who agreed to come out of the shadows and reveal themselves to the U.S. government so they can do such useful things as go to college, work, defend our country and pay taxes. These are folks the American education system already has invested in. They are law-abiding upand-comers who in most cases have no home country to return to.

Trump appears to be responding to hardliners like the columnist Ann Coulter. Upset that Trump signed a $1.3 trillion budget that lacks money to build the wall, these critics have skewered the president of late over his failure to honor his primary campaign promise.

Coulter, warning she is on a path to become a dedicated “Former Trumper,” even entrusted a New York Times columnist to deliver this harrowing message over the weekend: “If he played us for suckers, oh, you will not see rage like you have seen.”

Trump employs the biggest bully pulpit in the nation. His party controls Washington. He’s the one who canceled DACA last September and he’s the one who keeps getting in the way of solving this problem that plenty of conservatives wish to remedy — and to do so while wringing key concessions from liberals.

Instead Trump prefers insults and distraction. Meanwhile, our broken immigration system continues hobbling along.

Thrashing the kids with dubious claims on Easter is hardly evidence of good leadership. Too bad more of the sacred day’s lessons weren’t more on Trump’s mind.