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Trump Signals DACA ‘Deal’ With Democrats

   DailyWire.com
U.S. President Barack Obama, from right, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, U.S. First Lady-elect Melania Trump, and U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama stand for a photograph outside of the White House ahead of the 58th presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Friday, Jan. 20, 2017.
Kevin Dietsch/Pool via Bloomberg/Getty Images

On Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump signaled a deal with congressional Democrats if the U.S. Supreme Court were to rule in his favor concerning the controversial Obama-era DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) immigration program.

“If Supreme Court remedies with overturn, a deal will be made with Dems for them to stay!” the president said via Twitter regarding DACA.

The Supreme Court will consider the Trump administration’s decision to end the DACA program, which has been argued to have been unconstitutionally enacted by the Obama administration via executive action.

The program defers deportations of immigrants brought over by their parents at a young age.

In the same tweet where Trump signaled a forthcoming deal, he ripped DACA. “Many of the people in DACA, no longer very young, are far from ‘angels,'” he wrote. “Some are very tough, hardened criminals.”

According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, about 8% of DACA recipients have criminal records:

8-percent of total DACA requestors (59,786 individuals) had arrest records as of the date the systems were queried, which included offenses such as assault and battery, rape, murder, and drunk driving, among others. “Requestors” includes individuals approved and denied DACA.

Trump added in the tweet: “President Obama said he had no legal right to sign order, but would anyway.”

This is also basically true. As noted by Heritage, Obama repeatedly acknowledged that he could not take such action alone, but did so anyway:

Responding in October 2010 to demands that he implement immigration reforms unilaterally, Obama declared, “I am not king. I can’t do these things just by myself.” In March 2011, he said that with “respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case.” In May 2011, he acknowledged that he couldn’t “just bypass Congress and change the (immigration) law myself. … That’s not how a democracy works.”

“The Trump administration announced its plan to phase out the program in 2017, only for the federal courts to rule that it could not apply retroactively and that DACA should be restarted in full,” Fox News reported.

In April 2018, U.S. District Judge John Bates ruled that Trump could not legally end DACA, calling the decision to end the program “arbitrary and capricious because the [Trump administration] failed adequately to explain its conclusion that the program was unlawful.”

“So, in other words, if a president takes an executive action, then the subsequent president cannot undo that executive action — even if that original executive action has been declared unconstitutional, at least in part,” Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro explained at the time.

“This is insanity,” Shapiro continued, adding, “Here’s how leftist courts have now ruled: an action that is obviously unconstitutional is no longer unconstitutional when performed by President Obama; undoing that unconstitutional action is unconstitutional if performed by President Trump.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said of the decision at the time: “Today’s order doesn’t change the Department of Justice’s position on the facts: DACA was implemented unilaterally after Congress declined to extend benefits to this same group of illegal aliens.”

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