Did the Republican leaders of ten states and Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III coordinate the legal threat that those states have promised to take against the Trump administration if it does not rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) by next month? The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has just filed public records requests in those 10 states to find out. What gives the group grave concern—and suspicion—is that Sessions seems to be gladly welcoming the states’s legal threat:
The states attacking DACA appear to have allies in the Trump administration. Responding to the states’ June letter, Sessions remarked: “I like [that] states and localities are holding the federal government to account and expecting us to do our responsibility to the state and locals, and that’s to enforce the law.” These statements raise serious questions regarding the Trump administration’s commitment to defending DACA as well as questions about possible communications between the states and members of the administration.
“It would be very telling if there was in fact communication between the attorneys general offices and the Trump administration because it would show there’s a coordinated attack against DACA and that they are trying to subvert Trump, who said DACA recipients should 'rest easy,'” the ACLU’s Lorella Praeli, a Dreamer, told Buzzfeed.
From the start of his campaign, Donald Trump promised to rescind DACA should he be elected, despite meeting with immigrant youth before his run and saying they “convinced” him on immigration. Because Trump speaks out of both sides of his mouth and won’t give a definitive answer on the future of DACA, nearly 800,000 immigrant youth continue to live in anxiety. Sessions, of course, has vocally opposed the program, and there’s strong indications the administration won’t defend it in court.
But the fact is that rescinding DACA—which the Obama administration implemented in 2012 and successfully defended in court in the following years—wouldn’t just hurt immigrant youth by taking away their deportation protections and work permits, it “would also hurt the country as a whole”:
The Center for American Progress estimates that ending DACA would result in a loss of $460.3 billion from the gross domestic product over the next decade and remove an estimated 685,000 workers from the nation’s economy. The CATO Institute’s estimates are more conservative but still grim: The cost of immediately deporting approximately 750,000 DACA recipients would be over $60 billion, along with a $280 billion reduction in economic growth over the next decade.
Trump would shoot someone on 5th Avenue for the kind of polling Dreamers get—a majority of American voters say that not only should DACA continue, but that immigrant youth are here to stay:
Even in this hyper-partisan moment, Americans across the political spectrum overwhelmingly support DACA. Nearly 78 percent of voters believe that the Dreamers should be allowed to stay in the country, including 73 percent of voters who supported Trump in the November election.
While defending and preserving DACA is among the most important fights in the immigrant front right now, the program has always been a temporary measure that needs to be replaced with permanent protections. Currently, bipartisan legislation that would put immigrant youth on a path to citizenship sits in both the House and the Senate. “Congress cannot allow DREAMers to be targeted. Congress must offer them hope. Congress must pass our DREAM Act,” said Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA), who, along with Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), introduced a DREAM Act in the House of Representatives. “I strongly urge all my House colleagues to co-sponsor this bill, and seize this precious opportunity to protect America’s DREAMers.”