This morning the Trump administration announced that DACA, the Obama-era executive action to protect undocumented immigrants brought into this nation while they were still children, had been revoked. The final Trump decision was even more mean-spirited than previous rumors had suggested, with an order to DHS to stop accepting applications "immediately." Those already benefiting from DACA would be able to renew their status only until next March.
Trump was too much a coward to make the announcement himself, instead sending one of the top cheerleaders for the decision, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, to do it for him. Sessions framed the decision as protecting "the rule of law"—one week after Trump pardoned former sheriff Joe Arpaio for repeatedly and willfully violating the law in his zeal to find, punish, abuse, injure, and terrorize undocumented immigrants.
Trump himself possibly does not even know the drastic nature of his own decision: "As late as one hour before the decision was to be announced," reports the New York Times, "administration officials privately expressed concern that Mr. Trump might not fully grasp the details of the steps he was about to take, and when he discovered their full impact, would change their mind." This suggests either that the man is incapable of grasping the tasks of office—plausible, to be sure—or that Sessions and other hardliners worked to hide from him the full impact of ending the program.
In other DACA news today:
• The move was widely seen by observers as being transparently racist and yet another sop to his white nationalist base, because of course it was.
• Former President Barack Obama was critical of the move in a Facebook-posted statement, calling it "cruel" and that "ultimately, this is about basic decency."
• Current White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has yet to provide any evidence that she has even so much as met Trump, much less knows his "thinking", dismissed the thought of Congress passing a standalone bill reinstating DACA protections; the White House would only support "comprehensive immigration reform"—code for funding a border wall and other Trump desires. While the administration attempted to spin the DACA decision as out of their hands—something that Congress, not the presidency, should "fix"—the news that they would not support a "fix" if Congress presented them indicates that the Trump team intends to rescind DACA protections regardless of what Congress thinks.