President Donald Trump has decided to end the Obama-era program that grants work permits to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country as children, according to two sources familiar with his thinking. Senior White House aides huddled Sunday afternoon to discuss the rollout of a decision likely to ignite a political firestorm — and fulfill one of the president’s core campaign promises.
Trump has wrestled for months with whether to do away with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA. He has faced strong warnings from members of his own party not to scrap the program and struggled with his own misgivings about targeting minors for deportation.
Conversations with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who argued that Congress — rather than the executive branch — is responsible for writing immigration law, helped persuade the president to terminate the program, the two sources said, though White House aides caution that — as with everything in the Trump White House — nothing is set in stone until an official announcement has been made.
In a nod to reservations held by many lawmakers, the White House plans to delay the enforcement of the president’s decision for six months, giving Congress a window to act, according to one White House official. But a senior White House aide said that chief of staff John Kelly, who has been running the West Wing policy process on the issue, “thinks Congress should’ve gotten its act together a lot longer ago.”
Trump is expected to announce his decision on Tuesday, and the White House informed House Speaker Paul Ryan of the president’s decision on Sunday morning, according to a source close to the administration. Ryan had said during a radio interview on Friday that he didn’t think the president should terminate DACA, and that Congress should act on the issue.
Trump will call Ryan out on Tuesday it seems and leave the problem on his doorstep with a six-month time bomb attached. Trump can blame Republicans in Congress for failing to fix DACA and he'll get away with it too as Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are right now just about the only folks in Washington that everyone hates more than Trump.
If the Dems are smart they'll have a DACA fix bill ready.
But Trump is crafty here, he's not going to take the fall for DACA alone. Should Ryan and McConnell get a bill through Trump won't sign it anyway, but there's no way one gets to his desk anyhow, the racists in the House GOP may not even let a fix out of committee.
Privately kicking DACA to March must be a relief for a lot of Republicans. A lot can happen in six months politically.
We'll see.
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