Trump plans to end DACA with six-month delay

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program is the Obama-era initiative to hold off on targeting and deporting undocumented immigrants (particularly kids who’ve spent much of their lives in the US and who have few ties to their birth country) so long as they study and work and keep the peace. It’s a net benefice: it avoids punishing people for something they had no control over (where they were born), it spares families from being torn apart needlessly, it encourages good and productive behavior, and it allows the government to focus on actual troublemakers. It’s basic common sense and decency rolled into a no-brainer.

So of course Trump plans to do away with it.

President Trump is strongly considering a plan that would end the Obama-era program that shields young undocumented immigrants from deportation, but only after giving Congress six months to come up with a potential replacement for the popular initiative, according to three administration officials briefed on the discussions.

Officials working on the plan stressed that Mr. Trump could still change his mind, and some key details had not yet been resolved. Among them: whether beneficiaries of the program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, would be allowed to renew their protected status during the six-month period.

The compromise, which could lead to legislation superseding President Barack Obama’s executive order, is intended to address a growing chorus of Republican lawmakers, led by the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, who have implored the White House to keep some form of the program.

[…]

But administration aides concede that Congress may be unable to agree on a legislative fix, given the headwinds that previous legislation has run into for years. It is unclear exactly what would happen after six months if Congress does not act.

This move isn’t very surprising, considering the combination of Trump’s bigotry and his zeal to undo everything President Obama ever did. It’s also completely unsurprising that he’d contradict a promise he made only four months ago that Dreamers could “rest easy”; breaking promises and flip-flopping all over the place is just what he does, and only a total fool would be shocked by it anymore.

Unsurprising, but no less outrageous and demoralizing. Hundreds of thousands of peaceful, law-abiding young students and workers across the country now have to wonder if they’re about to be shoved out of the only home most of them have ever known, or whether their undocumented family members are about to be deported right alongside them. And the cruel irony is that because of how the DACA program worked, these immigrants had to prove their undocumented status to the federal government under Obama, trusting that administration to uphold their end of the deal. As a result, Trump has all the information he’d ever need to round them all up and toss them out.

Aliens could replace him with an evil body double bent on destroying everything good about the country and there would scarcely be a noticeable difference.