Thread: President Trump says he, not subordinates, will make the final call on DACA

JULY 13, 2017, 3:50 P.M.

President Trump says he, not subordinates, will make the final call on DACA

David Lauter

A group of "Dreamers" with Donald Trump at Trump Tower in New York in 2013. (Diego Sanchez)

President Trump said Thursday that he, and not subordinate officials, would make the decision about what to do with President Obama's program that shields more than 750,000 people from deportation who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children.

"It’s a decision that I make, and it’s a decision that’s very very hard to make. I really understand the situation now," Trump said.

"I understand the situation very well. What I’d like to do is a comprehensive immigration plan. But our country and political forces are not ready yet," he added.

Trump's Homeland Security secretary, John F. Kelly, had suggested in remarks Wednesday that Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions might make the final decision about the program, known as DACA, if it is challenged in court.

Trump's remarks appeared to suggest that he would not delegate the decision about the future of the young people known as "Dreamers" to Sessions.

California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra said this week he is prepared to do everything in his power to defend the program – including standing with the Trump administration against a legal threat from Republican states.

Last month, Kelly released a memorandum that formally ended the legal fight over a related program, the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA. That initiative sought to temporarily remove the threat of deportation for the parents of children who are U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents but was never fully implemented.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/wash...htmlstory.html

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

"It’s a decision that I make, and it’s a decision that’s very very hard to make. I really understand the situation now," Trump said.

I don't like the sound of that. It's kind of sounding like he's changing his mind.

BAD news.

Trump says he wants ‘comprehensive immigration plan’ but country isn’t ready

ALIPAC Opposes Trump Comprehensive Amnesty Plan Announced Today! Do you?
https://www.alipac.us/f8/alipac-oppo...-today-348782/

What I hear in Trump's comments is he is saying it is not underlings like DHS Secretary John Kelly making the decision to keep DACA Amnesty in place... it is him.

Those are Trump's orders and he is admitting as much now.

W

"It’s a decision that I make, and it’s a decision that’s very very hard to make. I really understand the situation now," Trump said.

I'm going to hope by saying "I really understand the situation now" and "it's a decision that's very very very hard to make" are phrases worded to acquiesce to the 10-state coalition that is threatening to follow through on a lawsuit against DACA.

Yes, I'm being a little optimistic, however, Trump may feel his has been forced into a position where his only option is to end DACA. To attempt to defend DACA in court after saying it was unconstitutional and illegal during his campaign would make him feel and look very foolish. The whole process of defending DACA in court after what he's said in the past would be totally humiliating! Furthermore, how would he get AG Sessions to go along? I don't think he could.

In the end, I think Trump will end DACA before Sept. 5th. Not because he wants too, but because he really doesn't have another option that I can see.

END DACA...no path to stay...no back door amnesty!

They need to go home and contribute to the success of THEIR country.

How do their countries prosper and provide a better life for their people if we continue to accept these criminal trespassers!

Deport them all and their government needs to set up a program to place them. They have resources, they have land...start a building boom and make new villages.

All these people have skills...put them to work on their soil.

The future of DACA suddenly looks very shaky


If Trump makes 780,000 young immigrants vulnerable to deportation again, all hell might break loose.

Updated by Dara Linddara@vox.com Jul 14, 2017, 9:30am EDT

• Photo by Eric Thayer-Pool/Getty ImagesPresident Trump looks like he might be gearing up to touch the third rail of immigration policy in 2017: ending the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allowed young unauthorized immigrants to work legally and protected them from deportation.

Democrats are bracing for a second wave of an immigration crackdown this fall: White House adviser Stephen Miller is reportedly working with members of Congress on a bill to curb legal immigration, while Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly refused to assure members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus about the future of some immigrants currently protected from deportation.
But it’s DACA that could open the floodgates.

The unauthorized immigrants it protects are politically sympathetic and well-connected — they’ve gone to school in the US, are fluent in English, and may not have even known they weren’t in the country legally before applying to college. Some polling finds Americans oppose ending the program by a two-to-one margin.

That may be why Trump has been reticent to kill DACA, even as he’s cracked down on immigration enforcement in his first months in office. On Thursday, he told reporters he’s still wrestling with it: "It’s a decision that I make and it’s a decision that’s very, very hard to make.”

Here’s what has Democrats worried, though: The decision, in some ways, might not be Trump’s to make anymore.

A letter signed last month by a group of Republican state attorneys general might have set off a chain of events that could force Trump’s hand — or at least persuade him to cut the cord on DACA. And then all legislative hell could break loose.

Why DACA is suddenly in the crosshairs

The Trump administration has had several opportunities to end DACA — either by nullifying the existing protections for the 780,000 people who’ve already been approved under the program or by refusing to accept any new people or renew the two-year protections for existing DACA recipients when they expire.

It hadn’t taken any of them yet. Even when it formally killed an abortive 2014 program expanding deferred action, it explicitly made clear that it wasn’t killing the program that was already in effect.
This has been a sore spot for immigration hardliners, who understood Trump’s campaign promise to roll back President Obama’s “unconstitutional executive orders” as a promise to end DACA. (DACA’s constitutionality hasn’t been successfully challenged, but immigration hawks believe the president’s legal authority to protect immigrants from deportation in individual cases doesn’t extend to a program that allowed certain immigrants to apply en masse.)

In June, a group of 10 Republican state officials, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, took matters into their own hands. They wrote the administration a letter asking them to end the DACA program — and threatening to file a federal lawsuit over the program’s constitutionality if the administration failed to act.

That letter changed the calculus about whether or not to end DACA in two big ways. First of all, it shifted the focus from the Department of Homeland Security, which administers the program — and whose secretary, John Kelly, appears loath to go after DACA recipients — and toward the Department of Justice, which would have to defend DACA if the states took it to court.

That means, ultimately, it would come down to US Attorney General Jeff Sessions — a longtime immigration hardliner on legal and unauthorized immigration — as to whether, and how, to stand up for the program.

In theory, yes, ending the DACA program would ultimately be Trump’s call. But Kelly told members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus on Wednesday that, at present, it’s all up to Sessions. And while the president could theoretically overrule his AG (who was at one time one of Trump’s closest advisers, though the relationship now appears to be strained), it’s not clear how he could compel him to forcefully defend a program in court that Sessions wants to end.

It might not matter anyway. Here’s the other way the state AGs’ letter changed the calculus: If the administration doesn’t end DACA, and the states sue them over it, the program will likely be put on hold — at least temporarily — by a federal judge.

The challenge to DACA would be used to revive the suit against the 2014 deferred action program — which guarantees it would be heard by Southern District of Texas Judge Andrew Hanen. Republican state officials selected Hanen’s court when they challenged the 2014 deferred action program, and he hasn’t disappointed them — he’s clearly skeptical of the government’s actions to limit immigration enforcement. It’s not an ironclad guarantee that Hanen would rule against DACA, but it’s a pretty safe bet. And the fairly conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals might agree.

Under those circumstances, the program would at least be on hold for months or even years. And not only would the administration’s hand have been forced, but it would look like a loss for Trump — yet another court defeat on immigration, this time from the other side.

It’s not hard to imagine that President Trump might want to avoid a public loss. If he’s convinced that DACA is going to end anyway, he may choose to do it himself.
If DACA falls, it could start a chain reaction in Congress

The deadline given by the state attorneys general in their letter to the administration was September 5. That happens to be the day Congress is slated to return from its August recess.

Congress can’t stop the Trump administration from ending DACA, or Republican state governments from suing if it doesn’t. But if DACA does end, the pressure to act shifts to the legislative branch.
While immigration isn’t nearly as bipartisan an issue as it used to be — Democrats have overwhelmingly opposed efforts to ramp up enforcement, while few Republicans are still willing to come out in favor of legalization for unauthorized immigrants — there are still some Republican members of Congress who want to keep DACA recipients in the US. After the 2016 presidential election, members of both parties introduced a bill that would grant legal status to DACA recipients in case Trump ended the program; this spring, a group of Republican members of the House introduced their own legalization bill, called the “Recognizing America’s Children” (RAC) Act.

Those bills haven’t moved yet because there hasn’t yet been a threat to DACA. But if nearly 800,000 people are suddenly forced out of their jobs and faced with the threat of deportation at any time, supporters of legalization are likely to start pushing hard for Congress to take action.
The question is what they’ll accept in return.

Some conservatives, whether openly or behind closed doors, admit that they’re willing to accept a compromise that results in DACA recipients getting to stay in the US. (After all, they’re US-educated and fluent in English; for people worried about immigrants as threats to cultural integration, DACA recipients are not the most imminent threat.) But they want something in return: expanded immigration enforcement to target new arrivals and unauthorized immigrants living in the US, cuts to legal immigration in the future, or both.

Congressional Republicans are already asking for some expansions to immigration enforcement as part of the bill appropriating funds for the Department of Homeland Security, which passed out of a House committee this week. The bill would give DHS money to hire hundreds of Border Patrol agents and even more Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (responsible for apprehending and deporting immigrants living in the US). It would also give the department enough money for a few dozen miles of “physical barriers” at the US-Mexico border — which both the Trump administration and Democratic opponents are calling the first step in Trump’s “border wall.”

Right now, Democrats aren’t willing to agree to funding for any of this — and it’s likely that without their help, the expansion of enforcement funding would have to get stripped out of the appropriations bill before passage, just like similar provisions got rejected when Congress passed a funding bill in April. But in return for protecting nearly 800,000 newly vulnerable immigrants, they might have a harder time saying no to the wall.

Of course, to many hardliners that’s not much of a compromise. It’s plausible that some conservatives — or even some White House officials, like Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller — will be pushing for permanent policy changes to the immigration system as a condition for allowing those 780,000 immigrants to stay without fear. They might demand that the bills passed by the House last month, which mandated five-year prison sentences for illegal reentry into the US and stripped some federal funding from “sanctuary cities” that didn’t agree to hold immigrants for pickup by federal agents, be added to any compromise.

Or they might demand to add bills passed out of the House Judiciary Committee this spring — which, among other things, would make it a federal crime to be in the US without papers.

Or they might demand cuts to future legal immigration in the form of the RAISE Act pushed by Sen. Tom Cotton (who’s currently working on revising the bill with Miller), which aims to cut legal immigration to the US in half over the course of a decade.

The possibilities aren’t endless, but they’re close. Once Congress agrees to crack open the door on immigration, it’s going to be hard to keep it from opening all the way, into a free-for-all over immigration policy writ large. And if DACA ends, there’s going to be a lot of pressure on Congress to open that door for the sake of nearly 800,000 American-raised DREAMers.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (and, to a lesser extent, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell) really doesn’t want this fight. It would expose the fissures in his party between traditional pro-business conservatives who have been open to some form of legalization — like Ryan himself — and the hardline populists who rose to power over the past few years and are currently sitting in the White House. It would bog down the congressional agenda at a time when Congress is already worried about getting everything done.

And it certainly looks like Trump himself doesn’t want this fight. He told reporters Thursday that he wants a “comprehensive” solution on immigration (though it’s not clear what “comprehensive” means to Donald Trump) but that the politics “aren’t ready.”

If they’re not ready now, they won’t be ready in September. But thanks to state officials from Trump and Ryan’s own party, that fight might be coming, ready or not.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...-trump-amnesty

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