Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times
Supporters of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program demonstrate outside the Supreme Court in Washington, on Thursday, June 18, 2020, after the court ruled on the Obama-era program that protects young immigrants from immediate deportation. The Supreme Court has given President Trump a new opening to rally his right-wing base by arguing that he needs another four years to stack the courts with conservative jurists.
The New York Times Company
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Friday that he will once again attempt to end a program designed to protect young immigrants from deportation, one day after the Supreme Court said his earlier efforts to do so were arbitrary and improper.
In September 2017, Trump moved to terminate the Obama-era program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, making good on a 2016 campaign promise in which he called the program an illegal executive amnesty. On Thursday, the court said the administration had not followed the rules required to end the program, allowing it to remain in place for now.
In a tweet Friday morning, Trump vowed to try again.
“We will be submitting enhanced papers shortly in order to properly fulfill the Supreme Court’s ruling & request of yesterday,” Trump wrote.
Cracking down on illegal immigration was at the heart of the president’s first campaign, and Trump has spent much of the past three years waging an assault on the nation’s immigration system in an attempt to reduce the number of foreigners in the United States.
The decision to end DACA was a centerpiece of those efforts. Put in place by former President Barack Obama, the program allows about 800,000 young immigrants who were brought to the United States as children to live and work legally without the threat of immediate deportation.
Surveys show that most Americans — including a majority of Republicans — support allowing the young immigrants, known as Dreamers, to stay. But the president’s hard-line advisers, including Stephen Miller, the architect of his immigration agenda, have urged the president to follow through on his promise to his conservative supporters.
Trump did not say when his administration will issue a new order terminating the DACA program, and it remains unclear what will happen in the meantime. Before the court’s ruling Thursday, the DACA program had been in limbo — protecting existing recipients but closed to new applicants.
