Trump says he’ll try again to stop DACA program
‘Enhanced papers’ will be filed after high court decision
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Friday that he will once again attempt to end a program designed to protect young immigrants from deportation, one day after the Supreme Court said his earlier efforts to do so were arbitrary and improper.
In September 2017, Trump moved to terminate the Obama-era program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, making good on a campaign promise in which he called the program an illegal executive amnesty. On Thursday, the high court said the administration had not followed the rules required to end the program, allowing it to remain in place for now.
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.
Within moments, one of Trump’s top immigration officials at the Department of Homeland Security, tweeted that the administration is eager to terminate the protections for the young immigrants in a way that will pass muster with the court.
“We are on it at @DHSgov Mr. President!” wrote Ken Cuccinelli, a deputy secretary at the department and one of the president’s most hard-line immigration advisers.
Cracking down on illegal immigration was at the heart of the president’s first campaign, and Trump has spent much of the last three years waging an assault on the nation’s immigration system in an attempt to reduce the number of foreigners in the United States.
The decision to end DACA was a centerpiece of those efforts. Put in place by former President Barack Obama, the program allows about 800,000 young immigrants who were brought to the United States as children to live and work legally without the threat of immediate deportation.
Surveys show most Americans — including a majority of Republicans — support allowing the young immigrants, also known as Dreamers, to stay. But the president’s hard-line advisers, including Stephen Miller, the architect of his immigration agenda, have urged the president to follow through on his promise to his conservative supporters.
A new effort to kill the program would draw another legal challenge that would be unlikely to be settled before the election. Trump’s announcement that he intends to again seek an end to the DACA protections sent a clear message to Capitol Hill, where top lawmakers acknowledged that legislative action will be needed to permanently address the fate of the group of young immigrants.
“It grants a reprieve, obviously, for the Dreamers, which again, I think is very important and necessary,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, RAlaska, 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, fierce battles over immigration have expressed skepticism that the deeply divided lawmakers could reach consensus on broad immigration legislation in the months before the fall elections. Repeated efforts to negotiate an immigration deal between Democratic lawmakers and Trump in the last three years have all collapsed.
In January 2018, Trump appeared ready to embrace a bipartisan deal that would have given permanent, legal status to the young immigrants in exchange for border security enhancements and other immigration changes. But the possibility of a deal collapsed after the president’s hard-line advisers rebelled against it.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., expressed hope that something could be achieved, but also said lawmakers must be realistic.
Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said immigration reform 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.”