Donald Trump’s Cowardice on ‘Dreamers’
In a short, disingenuous speech, he said a program set up by President Barack Obama in 2012 — known as DACA, for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — was a lawless policy
that “yielded terrible humanitarian consequences” and denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of American citizens.
Sessions called DACA “an unconstitutional exercise of authority”
and said “failure to enforce the laws in the past has put our nation at risk of crime, violence and terrorism.”
False, false, false and false.
Instead, he hid in the shadows and sent his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to do the dirty work of telling the country
that the administration would no longer shield from deportation 800,000 young undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children.
Even the Chamber of Commerce, usually a reliable backer of the Republican legislative agenda,
called the decision to end DACA “contrary to fundamental American principles.”
The only bad thing that could be said about DACA is that,
because it was a presidential memorandum, it was always vulnerable to being undone by a shortsighted administration playing to its base
Presidents of both parties have done that for decades,
and President Obama did it by focusing on people with criminal records and not on those brought to this country as children.