The problem with executive orders is that what one president puts together, the next one can take apart. And that is what President Trump has done to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.
Despite ensuring DREAMers they wouldn’t have to worry, Trump announced Tuesday that he is ending the DACA program and calling on Congress to legislate a fix.
The DACA program defers deportation of persons who were brought to the United States as children under the age of 16, who meet other requirements. President Obama initiated the DACA program after the repeated failure of Congress to pass the Development, Relief, and Education for Minors – or DREAM – Act, and conservatives have been crying executive overreach ever since.
Trump tried to sugar the pill by granting a six-month delay to the program’s termination. But for those DREAMers whose DACA status expires in six months and one day, their status still expires in six months and one day. In effect, only 24 percent of DACA recipients will be able to renew their permits before the program is shuttered. The remaining 76 percent of DACA permits will expire on their current date of expiration, which could be as soon as March 6, 2018.
This past weekend Sen. Orrin Hatch urged Trump to not dissolve the DACA program. “We ... need a workable, permanent solution for individuals who entered our country unlawfully as children through no fault of their own and who have built their lives here,” Hatch said.
In a Tuesday statement supporting legislating the DACA program, Utah’s Attorney General Sean Reyes said, “It is unconscionable to deport a young person who came to this country as a child or even infant without any choice of their own. These kids are our kids too.”
A legislative fix is the optimum solution to the unfair and uncertain circumstances DREAMers face. But Trump should have waited until a legislative fix was in fact enacted before ending the DACA program.
According to a Morning Consult and Politico poll, 78 percent of registered voters support allowing DREAMers to remain in the country. This is a winning issue for both Republicans and Democrats. As the Salt Lake Chamber stated, “The last five years has proven that DACA works.”
Not only will DREAMers now live under a shroud of uncertainty as they wait for Congress to determine their futures, but they have literally given the government the exact personal information needed to find them, and deport them.
Congress has a moral duty to enact, by statute, the DACA program once and for all.