Over the weekend, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to say the DACA program is dead. He also said people were rushing to cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally to receive DACA status.
Darlene Superville, a White House reporter for the Associated Press, says the president may have been responding to a report he saw on Fox News.
“We understand there was some reporting on Fox News [Sunday] morning about a caravan of people that are making their way through Central America, hoping to get to Mexico and then hoping to cross the border,” Superville says. “The theory is that a lot of these people who are still trying to cross the border do not know that DACA is closed, and that smugglers are taking advantage of them by telling them that they can participate in DACA.”
The Fox News segment was based on a report by Buzzfeed.
Superville says some lawmakers, including Ohio Gov. John Kasich, have criticized the president’s tweets, particularly because of his timing on Easter Sunday.
“Because when the president says DACA is no more, that he’s done with trying to get a deal on DACA, that leaves hundreds and thousands of individuals who are currently protected under the program exposed to the possibility of being deported,” Superville says.
The president ended the DACA program last year and gave Congress six months to pass a new law to replace it.
“But the White House and Democrats in Congress and some Republicans, they just have not been able to agree on how to do it,” she says. “And part of that is because the president also wants money for the border wall that he wants to build between the U.S. and Mexico. And he wants certain changes to the U.S. immigration system that some lawmakers are not comfortable with. And so as long as the White House insists on having those measures in any sort of DACA deal, there is unlikely to be a DACA deal.”
Superville says the Department of Homeland Security is renewing work permits for existing DACA recipients, though the future is uncertain for this group of immigrants.
Written by Jen Rice.
