Trump Administration Moves To Cancel DACA, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That 800,000 People Raised In America Were Still Permitted To Work In It

WASHINGTON. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Tuesday that the Trump administration would wind down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, ending the policy that had allowed roughly 800,000 immigrants brought to the United States as children to live and work in the country without fear of deportation, and resolving a long-standing concern that people who had grown up in America were being permitted to remain in it.

The program, created in 2012, required recipients to have arrived as minors, to have stayed in school or served in the military, and to pass criminal background checks, a set of conditions the administration characterized as an unconstitutional overreach. Sessions described the policy as "an unconstitutional exercise of authority" and said its rescission restored "the rule of law." Officials set a six-month deadline for the roughly 690,000 active recipients, after which their protections would begin to lapse at a rate of several hundred per day, and instructed Congress to address the matter if it cared to.

President Trump, who had campaigned on ending the program and who issued a written statement hours later, said he "did not favor punishing children, most of whom are now adults, for the actions of their parents," before clarifying that the children in question would lose their work permits and become eligible for removal. He directed Congress to resolve within six months a question it had declined to resolve over the preceding sixteen years.

"The president has tremendous heart for these young people," said one source within the administration, who noted that the heart in question remained fully compatible with deporting them. Recipients, many of whom had voluntarily disclosed their home addresses to the federal government as a condition of enrollment, were assured the information would be handled responsibly.

Nearly three years later, the Supreme Court would rule that the manner of the rescission was "arbitrary and capricious" and order the program restored, a ruling the administration would describe as a temporary procedural setback in the broader project of removing people who had carefully filled out all the paperwork.

At press time, several hundred thousand Americans in everything but status were refreshing a federal website to learn whether the only country they could remember intended to keep them.