Obama Speaks Out On Trump Ending Dreamer Protections

WASHINGTON ― Former President Barack Obama said Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s deci­sion to dis­man­tle the pro­gram pro­tect­ing young undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants was “con­trary to our spir­it, and to com­mon sense.”

Trump announced Tuesday that he will end Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals pro­gram, or DACA, in six months. Unless Congress steps in, end­ing the pro­gram could put near­ly 800,000 undoc­u­ment­ed young peo­ple at risk of depor­ta­tion and unable to work legal­ly when their two-year per­mits expire.

Obama said it was a “polit­i­cal deci­sion, and a moral ques­tion” ― and one of basic decency.

“To tar­get these young peo­ple is wrong ― because they have done noth­ing wrong,” he said in a state­ment. “It is self-defeat­ing ― because they want to start new busi­ness­es, staff our labs, serve in our mil­i­tary, and oth­er­wise con­tribute to the coun­try we love. And it is cru­el. This is about whether we are a peo­ple who kick hope­ful young strivers out of America, or whether we treat them the way we’d want our own kids to be treat­ed. It’s about who we are as a peo­ple ― and who we want to be.”

Obama start­ed the pro­gram in 2012 and urged undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants who came to the U.S. as chil­dren to come for­ward to the gov­ern­ment, pay a fee and under­go a back­ground check before receiv­ing a two-year work per­mit and reprieve from deportation.

He did so after leg­isla­tive efforts to help Dreamers ― which are being revived now because of Trump’s deci­sions ― failed mul­ti­ple times, as he not­ed in his statement.

″[B]ecause it made no sense to expel tal­ent­ed, dri­ven, patri­ot­ic young peo­ple from the only coun­try they know sole­ly because of the actions of their par­ents, my admin­is­tra­tion act­ed to lift the shad­ow of depor­ta­tion from these young peo­ple, so that they could con­tin­ue to con­tribute to our com­mu­ni­ties and our coun­try,” Obama said.

Trump promised dur­ing his pres­i­den­tial cam­paign to imme­di­ate­ly end DACA, but Obama urged him not to, both pub­licly and in pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions. In his final press con­fer­ence as pres­i­dent, Obama said he would speak out if Trump tar­get­ed Dreamers “who have grown up here and for all prac­ti­cal pur­pos­es are American kids and send them some­place else when they love this coun­try; they are our kids’ friends and their class­mates, and are now enter­ing into com­mu­ni­ty col­leges or, in some cas­es, serv­ing in our military.”

“The notion that we would just arbi­trar­i­ly, or because of pol­i­tics, pun­ish those kids when they didn’t do any­thing wrong them­selves I think would be some­thing that would mer­it me speak­ing out,” Obama said at the time.