Trump vows new effort to halt DACA program

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Friday that he will once again attempt to end a program designed to protect young migrants from deportation, one day after the Supreme Court said his earlier efforts to do so were procedurally improper.

In September 2017, Trump moved to terminate the Obama administration program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, making good on a 2016 campaign promise in which he called the program an illegal executive amnesty.

On Thursday, the court said the administration had not followed the rules required to end the program, allowing it to remain in place for now. Splitting with Trump and judicial conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the four liberal justices in the 5-4 vote Thursday.

In a tweet Friday morning, Trump vowed to try again.

“We will be submitting enhanced papers shortly in order to properly fulfill the Supreme Court’s ruling & request of yesterday,” Trump wrote. “The Supreme Court asked us to resubmit on DACA, nothing was lost or won. They ‘punted,’ much like in a football game [where hopefully they would stand for our great American Flag]. We will be submitting enhanced papers shortly.”

Within moments, one of Trump’s top immigration officials at the Department of

Homeland Security tweeted that the administration is eager to end DACA in a way that will pass muster with the court.

“We are on it at @DHSgov Mr. President!” wrote Kenneth Cuccinelli, acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The high court found Thursday that Trump was well within a president’s considerable authority over immigration and the responsibility for keeping the nation safe, but the way the administration was ending the program did not follow proper procedure. They said the administration could try again.

Groups that support DACA said they will remain on guard against further action by Trump.

“What’s important to note: NOTHING has changed since yesterday and won’t change unless SCOTUS decides otherwise,” the immigration legal services provider and advocacy group RAICES, based in Texas, wrote on Twitter. “We’ll remain vigilant & ready to fight anything that may come.”

Hareth Andrade, a national staffer with Mi Familia Vota, an organization that focuses on voter engagement, said the president’s tweet is a “sore loser remark.” Andrade is also a DACA recipient.

“This appeal tactic will only run out the time he has left as president,” she said. “Our movement knows better, we have deeply organized our communities, and for now, have a SCOTUS decision on our side to keep our DACA benefits intact.”

Megan Essaheb, director of immigration advocacy for the Washington-based nonprofit Asian Americans Advancing Justice, said that while Trump can still terminate DACA, he could also choose to support legislation that provides legal status to recipients along with 300,000 people who have temporary status and the estimated 11 million who are in the U.S. without permission.

“If he chooses cruelty, it will be on him,” Essaheb said.

SOME LOOK TO CONGRESS

Addressing illegal immigration was at the heart of the president’s first campaign, and he has spent much of the past three years working to overhaul the nation’s immigration system in an attempt to reduce the number of illegal immigrants in the United States.

The decision to end DACA was a component of those efforts. Put in place by an executive order from former President Barack Obama, the program allows about 800,000 young immigrants — who were brought to the United States illegally as children — to live and work legally without the threat of immediate deportation.

Surveys show that most Americans support allowing the young immigrants, known as Dreamers, to stay. But the president’s advisers, including Stephen Miller, the architect of his immigration agenda, have urged the president to follow through on the promise to his conservative supporters.

Trump’s announcement that he intends to again seek an end to the DACA protections sent a clear message to Capitol Hill, where lawmakers acknowledged that legislative action will be needed to permanently address the fate of the immigrants.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the president has vowed to take care of DACA far better than the Democrats ever did.

“We want to find a compassionate way to do this,” McEnany said.

“We’re going to move as quickly as we can to put options in front of the president,” Cuccinelli told Fox & Friends.

“That still leaves open the appropriate solution which the Supreme Court mentioned, and that is that Congress step up to the plate,” he said.

“It grants a reprieve, obviously, for the Dreamers, which again, I think is very important and necessary,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said of the ruling. “But I also recognize that it then reminds us that it’s back in the lap of those of us here in Congress.”

But veterans of the recent battles over immigration have expressed skepticism that the deeply divided lawmakers could reach consensus on broad immigration legislation in the months before the fall election. Repeated efforts to negotiate an immigration deal between Democratic lawmakers and Trump in the past three years have all collapsed.

While some Republicans asserted that now is the time for Congress to clarify the immigration system, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made it clear that Democrats were done with their legislation before the summer break and had little interest in meeting GOP demands to fund Trump’s long-promised border wall as part of any comprehensive immigration overhaul.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said overhauling immigration was “worth a try — I’ve been trying for 20 years” — and that he didn’t want “to walk away from any opportunity.” In a letter to Trump signed by Durbin and 40 other Democratic senators, Durbin urged the president not to end DACA.

“We must ensure these talented young immigrants are not forced to stop working when the need for their public service has never been greater. And we must give them the chance they deserve to become American citizens,” the senators wrote.

But some Republicans were not optimistic.

“Comprehensive immigration reform has never worked, at least not in the time I’ve been here,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told reporters Thursday. “So I think what we need to do is figure out how to take it in bite-sized pieces and deal with it incrementally. I think if we did that on, on the DACA issue — because of the sympathetic nature of their plight — I think we’d have a better chance.”

Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, said he disagreed with the court ruling, and “it just reemphasizes that the House and Senate needs to do their work.”

DACA CURRENTLY FROZEN

For more than two years, the DACA program has been essentially frozen — people who had applied before September 2017 were still protected from deportation and allowed to work legally. But new applicants to the program were prohibited while the courts decided whether the program could continue.

After the ruling Thursday, allies of the president urged him not to give up.

“DACA was an illegal use of executive authority from the start. Clearly, an illegal policy must be reversed in order to restore the rule of law,” said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations for NumbersUSA, a group that pushes for reduced immigration.

“The court’s decision to require the administration to jump through additional procedural hoops to terminate an unlawful program that was created without jumping through those same hoops makes no sense,” she said.

Trump did not say when his administration would issue a new order terminating the DACA program, and it remains unclear what will happen in the meantime. Supporters of the program urged Trump to abandon his efforts to eliminate it.

“President Trump should forgo any further efforts to wind down the DACA program before the election, and Congress should get to work right away to permanently address the status of DACA recipients and the broader Dreamer population,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Instead, the president appears to be following the same playbook he used when courts blocked his efforts to impose a travel ban early in his administration. After two versions of the ban were rejected, the Supreme Court approved a third version, which remains in effect.

THOUSANDS IN LIMBO

In a statement Thursday, a senior official at the Citizenship and Immigration Services, which administers the DACA program, repeated his desire to see the program end.

“The fact remains that under DACA, hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens continue to remain in our country in violation of the laws passed by Congress and to take jobs Americans need now more than ever,” said Joseph Edlow, deputy director for policy at the agency.

For now, immigrants who are part of DACA will keep their protections, but there are tens of thousands of others who could have enrolled if Trump hadn’t halted the program three years ago.

The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, estimates that about 66,000 immigrants meet the age requirement of 15 to join the program but haven’t been able to do so because the government has only been renewing two-year permits for those already enrolled.

Citizenship and Immigration Services hasn’t signaled whether it will accept any new applications. Still, pro-DACA organizations are encouraging those who qualify to file first-time applications.

Trump’s announcement that he intends to again seek an end to the DACA protections sent a clear message to Capitol Hill, where lawmakers acknowledged that legislative action will be needed to permanently address the fate of the immigrants.