He’s Expected to End Program for U.S.-Raised Immigrants But Defer Enforcement for Six Months
DACA. Trump is expected to announce Tuesday that he will end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program which grants two-year, renewable work permits to undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. Former President Barack Obama started the program in June 2012. “This is as cruel and capricious a public policy decision that any president has made in a very long time,” said Obama’s former communication’s director, Dan Pfeiffer. Senior White House aides met Sunday to discuss the decision. The White House plans to delay enforcing the decision for six months. House Speaker Paul Ryan said Friday he didn’t think Trump should end DACA. “These are kids who know no other country,” Ryan said. About 800,000 “dreamers” benefit from DACA. Trump’s decision to deport people who were raised in our country and tell Congress to write the law to back this up comes as Republicans are facing a deadline at the end of this month to avert a government shutdown.
Threatened challenge. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and adviser Stephen Miller have been pushing Trump to end DACA. Eleven state attorneys general have threatened to legally challenge the program unless the administration phased out DACA by Sept. 5. “I don’t understand what anybody thinks we gain by taking away people’s ability to work and subject them to deportation, said former Obama adviser Cecilia Muñoz. Tech leaders including Timothy Cook of Apple, Jeffrey Bezos of Amazon and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook have urged Trump and congressional leaders to preserve the program. It is unclear what would happen if Congress doesn’t pass legislation on ending DACA. The program has protected people who could prove they arrived before age 16, had been in the United States for several years and have not committed a crime here.
H-Bomb. North Korea’s detonation of a sixth nuclear bomb on Sunday prompted the White House to warn that even the threat to use such a weapon against the United States and its allies “will be met with a massive military response.’’ The test immediately raised new questions about Trump’s North Korea strategy and opened a new rift with a major American ally, South Korea, which Trump criticized for its “talk of appeasement” with the North. The underground blast was by far North Korea’s most powerful ever. Though it was far from clear that the North had set off a hydrogen bomb, as it claimed, the explosion caused tremors that were felt in South Korea and China.
