President Donald Trump reportedly considering ending the Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals, an initiative that was put in place by the Obama administration, which allows people who enter the United States illegally as kids to stay in the country.
Government officials stated that the Department of Homeland Security has sent a letter of recommendation to the White House. While Jeff Sessions the attorney general met with senior officials to discuss the issue on Thursday.
This legislation could affect well over 1 million residents once it is official scrapped.
Reports states that President Trump is considering two options, let the DACA expire gradually or end it right away and it is not clear which option he would opt for.
The program “continues to be under review,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, told reporters Friday.
Different civil rights groups have kicked against DACA cancelling as it is believed that this would make the white supremacist’s groups only get worse.
“It would be a grave moral and legal error,” said Vanita Gupta, director of the Leadership Conference on Human Rights and former head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division under President Barack Obama.
“Killing the DACA program as the Trump administration’s first post-Charlottesville move would be absolutely shameful,” Gupta added. “We must not allow the hate violence that we saw on the streets of Charlottesville to become the guiding force for policy making.”
Obama also revealed that he would do all he can to keep the DACA afloat because it is part and parcel of the American values.
“The notion that we would just arbitrarily or because of politics punish those kids when they didn’t do something themselves…would merit my speaking out,” Obama said.
The DACA was put in place in 2012 during the Obama administration gives legal backing to kids whose brought them illegally into the United States to stay in the country if they came before they were 16 and have stayed in the country since then.
Those who this order applies to are required by law to renew their DACA status every 24 months.
The program covers 800,000 people and this gives them the right to secure a work permit. According to different rights groups over 200,000 have made enquiries about DACA status ever since Trump became president.
Greisa Martínez Rosas, director of advocacy and policy for the immigrant rights group United We Dream and a DACA recipient herself, told reporters, “We are ready to bring on the fight.”
“We are ready to ensure that Donald Trump does not throw our lives to Congress like a hot potato,” she said. “Donald Trump has the ability to keep the program in place and we will force him to do that — he awakened a sleeping giant and we will not go back to sleep.”
Trump revealed during his campaign that he would put an end to DACA but seems to have softened his stance where he stated that young people who are under this program do not need to worry as he’s focused only on criminals.
The 10 Republic attorneys general who sent the letter to the White House asking for the halting of the program suggested that it would be better to let the time frame of DACA end.
The letter has led to debates within the administration of President Trump as they are currently to figure out if the case can be difficult in court…