Jeff Sessions: DACA Is Dead
DACA is off the books.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Tuesday morning that President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals exec order, protecting about 800,000 undocumented immigrants who had been brought to this country as young children, is being rescinded. Sessions called it an “unconstitutional” act by the previous POTUS that has robbed jobs “from hundreds of thousands of Americans.”
“The DACA program was implemented in 2012 and essentially provided a legal status for recipients for a renewable two-year term, worker authorization and other benefits, including participation in the Social Security program, to 800,000 mostly adult illegal aliens,” Sessions said.
“The policy was implemented unilaterally, to great controversy and legal concern after Congress rejected legislative proposals to extend similar benefits, on numerous occasions, to this same group of illegal aliens,” the AG continued.
“The executive branch, through DACA, deliberately sought to achieve what the legislative branch specifically refused to authorize on multiple occasions. Such an open-ended circumvention of immigration laws, was an unconstitutional exercise of authority by the executive branch.”
According to Sessions, “the effect of this unilateral exec amnesty, among other things, contributed to a surge of minors at the southern border, that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences.”
The Department of Justice, Sessions insisted, “cannot defend this overreach, adding, “We cannot admit everyone who would like to come here. It’s just that simple.”
In conjunction with Sessions’ announcementm Department of Homeland Security’s Acting Secretary, Elaine Duke, issued a news release saying no new initial DACA requests or associated applications filed after today will be acted on. No one now on DACA will be impacted before March 5, 2018, nearly six months from now, giving “Congress time to deliver on appropriate legislative solutions.”
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