The decision President Donald Trump made to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) has been met with both celebration and disappointment around the country.
DACA is a program which allows undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children to remain in the country.
On Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the Obama-era program would be coming to a close. Though his declaration seemed definite, Congress has six months to come up with a plan to possibly save the policy.
According to Amber Athey, a reporter for The Daily Caller, DACA was only meant to be a temporary fix, and former President Barack Obama told us this back in 2012, when he announced the beginning of the program.
“This is a temporary stop-gap measure that lets us focus our resources wisely, while giving a degree of relief and hope to talented, driven and patriotic young people,” said Obama.
So why are people around the country so disgruntled about this entire situation?
Well, to be quite honest, a lot of it is political. Democrats are using the rescindment of the DACA program to blame Trump for being a hate-monger of immigrant children, when that is far from the truth.
Trump loves children, which is why he gave Congress a six-month deadline to pass new immigration legislation. This legislation would include some type of amnesty for the 800,000 people currently enrolled in the DACA program.
Had he cancelled it right away, all of those children would be in the process of deportation at this moment.
The truth is the program, the way Obama structured it, is unconstitutional. Congress refused to pass DACA as it was originally written in 2012. According to Adam Edelman, an NBC News reporter, this led to an executive order from the Obama Administration.
Obama used his power to issue an order of amnesty for undocumented children and sidestepped the federal laws already on the books. Obama failed to enforce those and other previous laws.
According to Jonathan Turley for The Hill, some criticized the action as a circumvention of the legislative branch and as an undermining of the system of the Separation of Powers.
However, because Democrats were happy with Obama’s actions, they yielded their institutional power to the White House—helping to create what so many people worry about—an unchecked presidency.
It is sad and discomforting that for many of these people, this land has been their only home. Nonetheless, they are here illegally, and we are a nation of laws.
Yes, our founders immigrated to this country, but they did so over two-hundred years ago. Times have changed, and we have laws on the books that should be enforced in order to protect those of us that are citizens in this country.
At the end of the day, the president of this country has one job: to protect the citizens of this country—to “faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to best of [his/her] ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
So help him, God.