Trump vows to end young immigrants deal
PALM BEACH — US President Donald Trump, blaming Democrats and the Mexican government for an increasingly “dangerous” flow of unauthorized immigrants, unleashed a series of fiery tweets on Sunday in which he vowed “NO MORE DACA DEAL” and threatened to walk away from the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Minutes after wishing the nation a happy Easter Sunday, Trump denounced “liberal” laws that he said were preventing Border Patrol agents from doing their jobs.
He said that Republicans should use the “nuclear option” to sidestep Democratic opposition in the Senate and enact “tough laws NOW.”
It was unclear whether the president’s tweets represented any change in his immigration policy, or were just the sort of venting he is known to do after reading a newspaper article or seeing a television program.
The president, who spent much of his holiday weekend golfing with supporters and watching television, was apparently reacting to a “Fox and Friends” segment on immigration that had aired minutes before.
Whatever his intention, Trump’s Twitter outburst captured the fickle tendencies that have driven his policy positions on immigration.
On the one hand, he has suggested at times that he is open to extending citizenship to mil- lions of unauthorized people.
On the other hand, he has denounced those who have entered the country illegally as brutal criminals and raged about lax enforcement that he said had allowed immigrants to pour into the country.
In his tweets, Trump referred to “caravans” of immigrants heading north toward the US-Mexico border — a subject that was addressed on the Fox program.
A group of hundreds of Central Americans has been traveling through Mexico toward the United States, where some hope to seek asylum or sneak across the border.
A reporter for BuzzFeed has been traveling with the group as it makes its way north.
As he walked into church in Palm Beach on Sunday morn- ing, Trump did not respond to a question from reporters about whether his tweets meant that he would no longer support any deal for the young immigrants protected by the DACA program.
But he said that “Mexico has got to help us at the border, and a lot of people are coming in because they want to take advantage of DACA.”
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, gave protected status to hundreds of thousands of young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children.
The program requires immigrants to have resided in the United States since 2007, meaning any crossing the border now would not be eligible.