As long as Democratic presidents are allowed to create immigration law by fiat, congressional Democrats will never reform our broken immigration system.
The Department of Homeland Security announced this week it will begin accepting applications for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the program earlier this month.
The ruling briefly put DACA back in the headlines, with most news outlets framing the judge’s order as a defeat for the departing Trump administration and a victory for Democrats and the “Dreamers.” But the media’s preferred narrative ignores the truth about DACA, an Obama-era program created by bureaucratic fiat in direct violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers.
Democrats and the media like to emphasize all the good DACA has done. They point out that the program’s recipients, mostly young people who were brought to the United States illegally before age 18, have earned degrees, begun careers, paid taxes, married, and had some 200,000 children who are U.S. citizens.
But none of that has anything to do with why President Trump and many Republicans want to end the program. Their purpose is not to punish DACA recipients but to pressure Congress to do its job and reform a dysfunctional and sclerotic immigration system that created this mess in the first place.
The Trump administration’s approach from the beginning was that DACA, however noble its aims, was not legal, and that only an act of Congress—an actual law—could shield certain people from deportation or create a new program authorizing work permits for hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, as DACA purported to do.
Trump’s widely criticized efforts to “end” the program were actually meant to prod Congress into action. Recall that in September 2017, the Trump administration announced a plan to phase out DACA, and then deferred the phase-out for six months to give Congress time to come up with a permanent solution.
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Lawmakers balked, but Trump gave them another chance during the government shutdown in January 2019, when he proposed a three-year extension of DACA along with an extension of a refugee program in exchange for $5.7 billion in funding for a border wall. The idea, again, was to extend DACA to allow Congress time to devise a permanent solution for DACA recipients, perhaps as part of a broader overhaul of the immigration system. Trump and his top advisors were clear about this at the time.
But congressional Democrats rejected the president’s offer even before it was announced. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it a “non-starter” and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer panned it as “hostage taking.”Read the rest HERE and follow links below to related stories:
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