As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes tweeted, White House chief of staff John Kelly works for Donald Trump “because he supports and admires Trump's worldview and agenda,” and that worldview and agenda is anti-immigrant and racist to the core:
Many DACA-eligible youth couldn’t afford the $495 application fee, and others were afraid their information would be used to target them later on. But “lazy immigrants,” right? Kelly is also lying with his false assurances that DACA recipients shouldn’t worry about Trump’s mass deportation, because DACA recipients have already been targeted, arrested, and deported:
Meanwhile, acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director Thomas Homan just doubled-down on his remark from last year that immigrant families with no criminal record should be living in perpetual fear of his mass deportation agents.
And let’s not forget that Trump already ended the DACA program last September:
More than 17,000 DACA recipients have already lost their protections since Trump announced the end of the program. While a court ordered Trump to resume accepting renewal applications, the administration is appealing this, and first-time applications are still not being accepted. Because eligible applications can take months to process, immigrant youth are likely falling into the cracks as their protections expire.
The fact is, under an administration as chaotic and racist as this one, even DACA’s very important protections are insufficient. Immigrant youth need permanent protections that cannot be rescinded just because Kelly and President Stephen Miller told Trump to. The solution is the bipartisan DREAM Act, but Kelly and Miller are doing everything in their power to prevent it.