Trump Ditches His Promise to 'Terminate' DACA

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Jonathan Alcorn / Reuters


Trump Ditches His Promise to 'Terminate' DACA

The president had repeatedly pledged to end the Obama-era program shielding undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children from deportation

• PRISCILLA ALVAREZ
• JUN 16, 2017

Donald Trump will keep the Obama-era program in place that shielded millions of undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children from deportation, contrary to his repeated pledges on the campaign trail to roll back the program.

The Department of Homeland Security, in guidance posted Thursday night, said recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, otherwise known as DACA, “will continue to be eligible” for renewal, adding that “no work permits will be terminated prior to their current expiration dates.”

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The news also comes as Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly announced the rolling back of the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, an Obama-era program known as DAPA designed to shield the undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and others from deportation.

Rolling back DAPA was largely a symbolic step—the program had never been implemented due to litigation. The back-to-back moves, however, offer some clarity on the administration’s stance on Obama programs that have long been a point of contention between immigration advocates and immigration restrictionists.

Trump said on the campaign trail that he would “immediately terminate” DACA. After his election, though, he appeared to waver on that position, telling ABC’s David Muir in an interview that recipients “shouldn’t be very worried.” He added: “I do have a big heart. We’re going to take care of everybody… But I will tell you, we’re looking at this, the whole immigration situation, we’re looking at it with great heart.”

According to the Pew Research Center, more than 750,000 undocumented immigrants “have received work permits and deportation relief” through DACA. The group includes immigrants who came to the United States before the age of 16. For some time, it was unclear how the administration intended to address recipients. Then, earlier this month, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services released figures showing that the administration was still granting work permits under the program.

News that the program will continue has been welcomed by advocates of more liberal immigration rules. “This is a big victory for Dreamers amid months of draconian and meanspirited immigration enforcement policy,” David Leopold, an immigration lawyer, told The New York Times. “The preservation of DACA is a tribute to the strength of the Dreamer movement and an acknowledgment — at least in part — by the Department of Homeland Security that it should not be targeting undocumented immigrants who have strong ties to their communities and have abided by the law.”
But the decision simultaneously puts the administration at odds with many immigration restrictionists, a crucial bloc of Trump supporters, who have expressed frustrations over the administration’s delay in addressing the program. “If continuing DACA in some form were part of a strategy, it would be totally defendable,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors reduced immigration, adding that “there’s no excuse for giving out new work permits who don’t have them already.”

The Trump administration has cracked down on illegal immigration since the president took office. Notably, Trump expanded the number of undocumented immigrants who are eligible for deportation. But for now, it appears that DACA recipients will not be part of that group.

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Against Donald Trump

For the third time since The Atlantic’s founding, the editors endorse a candidate for president. The case for Hillary Clinton.

The Editors November 2016 Issue Politics

In October of 1860, James Russell Lowell, the founding editor of The Atlantic, warned in these pages about the perishability of the great American democratic experiment if citizens (at the time, white, male citizens) were to cease taking seriously their franchise:

In a society like ours, where every man may transmute his private thought into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a peculiar responsibility rests upon the individual … For, though during its term of office the government be practically as independent of the popular will as that of Russia, yet every fourth year the people are called upon to pronounce upon the conduct of their affairs. Theoretically, at least, to give democracy any standing-ground for an argument with despotism or oligarchy, a majority of the men composing it should be statesmen and thinkers.

One of the animating causes of this magazine at its founding, in 1857, was the abolition of slavery, and Lowell argued that the Republican Party, and the man who was its standard-bearer in 1860, represented the only reasonable pathway out of the existential crisis then facing the country. In his endorsement of Abraham Lincoln for president, Lowell wrote, on behalf of the magazine, “It is in a moral aversion to slavery as a great wrong that the chief strength of the Republican party lies.” He went on to declare that Abraham Lincoln “had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician.”

Perhaps because no subsequent candidate for the presidency was seen as Lincoln’s match, or perhaps because the stakes in ensuing elections were judged to be not quite so high as they were in 1860, it would be 104 years before The Atlantic would again make a presidential endorsement. In October of 1964, Edward Weeks, writing on behalf of the magazine, cited Lowell’s words before making an argument for the election of Lyndon B. Johnson. “We admire the President for the continuity with which he has maintained our foreign policy, a policy which became a worldwide responsibility at the time of the Marshall Plan,” the endorsement read. Johnson, The Atlantic believed, would bring “to the vexed problem of civil rights a power of conciliation which will prevent us from stumbling down the road taken by South Africa.”

But The Atlantic’s endorsement of Johnson was focused less on his positive attributes than on the flaws of his opponent, Barry Goldwater, the junior senator from Arizona. Of Goldwater, Weeks wrote, “His proposal to let field commanders have their choice of the smaller nuclear weapons would rupture a fundamental belief that has existed from Abraham Lincoln to today: the belief that in times of crisis the civilian authority must have control over the military.” And the magazine noted that Goldwater’s “preference to let states like Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia enforce civil rights within their own borders has attracted the allegiance of Governor George Wallace, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birchers.” Goldwater’s limited capacity for prudence and reasonableness was what particularly worried The Atlantic.

We think it unfortunate that Barry Goldwater takes criticism as a personal affront; we think it poisonous when his anger betrays him into denouncing what he calls the “radical” press by bracketing the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Izvestia. There speaks not the reason of the Southwest but the voice of Joseph McCarthy. We do not impugn Senator Goldwater’s honesty. We sincerely distrust his factionalism and his capacity for judgment.

Today, our position is similar to the one in which The Atlantic’s editors found themselves in 1964. We are impressed by many of the qualities of the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, even as we are exasperated by others, but we are mainly concerned with the Republican Party’s nominee, Donald J. Trump, who might be the most ostentatiously unqualified major-party candidate in the 227-year history of the American presidency.

These concerns compel us, for the third time since the magazine’s founding, to endorse a candidate for president. Hillary Rodham Clinton has more than earned, through her service to the country as first lady, as a senator from New York, and as secretary of state, the right to be taken seriously as a White House contender. She has flaws (some legitimately troubling, some exaggerated by her opponents), but she is among the most prepared candidates ever to seek the presidency. We are confident that she understands the role of the United States in the world; we have no doubt that she will apply herself assiduously to the problems confronting this country; and she has demonstrated an aptitude for analysis and hard work.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has no record of public service and no qualifications for public office. His affect is that of an infomercial huckster; he traffics in conspiracy theories and racist invective; he is appallingly sexist; he is erratic, secretive, and xenophobic; he expresses admiration for authoritarian rulers, and evinces authoritarian tendencies himself. He is easily goaded, a poor quality for someone seeking control of America’s nuclear arsenal. He is an enemy of fact-based discourse; he is ignorant of, and indifferent to, the Constitution; he appears not to read.

This judgment is not limited to the editors of The Atlantic. A large number—in fact, a number unparalleled since Goldwater’s 1964 campaign—of prominent policy makers and officeholders from the candidate’s own party have publicly renounced him. Trump disqualified himself from public service long before he declared his presidential candidacy. In one of the more sordid episodes in modern American politics, Trump made himself the face of the so-called birther movement, which had as its immediate goal the demonization of the country’s first African American president. Trump’s larger goal, it seemed, was to stoke fear among white Americans of dark-skinned foreigners. He succeeded wildly in this; the fear he has aroused has brought him one step away from the presidency.

Our endorsement of Clinton, and rejection of Trump, is not a blanket dismissal of the many Trump supporters who are motivated by legitimate anxieties about their future and their place in the American economy. But Trump has seized on these anxieties and inflamed and racialized them, without proposing realistic policies to address them.

In its founding statement, The Atlantic promised that it would be “the organ of no party or clique,” and our interest here is not to advance the prospects of the Democratic Party, nor to damage those of the Republican Party. If Hillary Clinton were facing Mitt Romney, or John McCain, or George W. Bush, or, for that matter, any of the leading candidates Trump vanquished in the Republican primaries, we would not have contemplated making this endorsement. We believe in American democracy, in which individuals from various parties of different ideological stripes can advance their ideas and compete for the affection of voters. But Trump is not a man of ideas. He is a demagogue, a xenophobe, a sexist, a know-nothing, and a liar. He is spectacularly unfit for office, and voters—the statesmen and thinkers of the ballot box—should act in defense of American democracy and elect his opponent.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...-trump/501161/

LOL!! So let me get this straight, you thought quoting an article from a NEVER-TRUMP magazine like the Atlantic would somehow lift you up from Mother Jones quotes?

You're embarrassing yourself and soiling the forum. In my opinion.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

4 days to go.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Judy

LOL!! So let me get this straight, you thought quoting an article from a NEVER-TRUMP magazine like the Atlantic would somehow lift you up from Mother Jones quotes?

You're embarrassing yourself and soiling the forum. In my opinion.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

4 days to go.

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Judy,

Donald Trump lied to all of us and has broken a very important campaign promise. That means we can expect more betrayals from him.

Please do not violate ALIPAC's forum rules by making attacks against other users accusing them of spoiling our forum because they posted an accurate article about Trump. MW is not spoiling our forum in any way by posting the truth about Donald Trump.

W

Trump didn't lie to me. If you think he lied to you, that's your opinion, but I will ignore MW going forward.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Judy

Trump didn't lie to me. If you think he lied to you, that's your opinion, but I will ignore MW going forward.

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He lied to all of us. If you want to attack the poster for every article you disagree with, that reflects negatively on you, not the poster. As for ignoring me, that's your choice.

Quote:

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Judy,

Donald Trump lied to all of us and has broken a very important campaign promise. That means we can expect more betrayals from him.

Please do not violate ALIPAC's forum rules by making attacks against other users accusing them of spoiling our forum because they posted an accurate article about Trump. MW is not spoiling our forum in any way by posting the truth about Donald Trump.

W

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Thank you, William.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ALIPAC

Judy,

Donald Trump lied to all of us and has broken a very important campaign promise. That means we can expect more betrayals from him.

Please do not violate ALIPAC's forum rules by making attacks against other users accusing them of spoiling our forum because they posted an accurate article about Trump. MW is not spoiling our forum in any way by posting the truth about Donald Trump.

W

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I agree with all of this comment. THANK YOU.

Time for Trump to bid farewell to DACA

Quote:

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Trump said on the campaign trail that he would “immediately terminate” DACA

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Keep your promise, Mr. President, end DACA now!