WASHINGTON, DC — FWD.us President Todd Schulte issued the following statement today after the Trump Administration issued a new memo to radically slash DACA protections, setting the stage to end DACA if Trump is re-elected:

To start: it is critical that everyone acknowledge the dangerous situation in which President Trump has been operating: He has, for weeks, remained in open defiance of the Supreme Court by refusing to accept new DACA applicants.

Now today, the Trump Administration announced plans to move ahead on a two-step plan to kill DACA, while pretending otherwise. First, they will move to radically reduce DACA benefits effective today. Second, they have set the stage to kill DACA in 2021- or even later this year.

And given that the public is overwhelmingly opposed to ending DACA, they are trying to spin the press that this is somehow a moderate position; in fact, this would result in deportations of nearly 700,000 DACA recipients beginning in a year.

The President is trying to avoid the political consequences of his wildly unpopular actions against Dreamers, while appealing to his anti-immigrant base. Cutting the program’s length in half—as of today—and excluding hundreds of thousands of new DACA applicants is cruel and chaotic.

Killing DACA was wrong in 2017. It is wrong today. The President lost in the highest court in the land and he has lost decisively in the court of public opinion. Continuing a pattern of three years of a huge public reaction against his anti-immigrants agenda, the President’s actions today are widely unpopular because they will hurt our country, and will continue to create massive challenges for him in the upcoming election.

Background

The Trump Administration issued a new memo today blocking Dreamers from filing new DACA applications and restricting the protections for existing DACA recipients. Just weeks ago, in an opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts, the Supreme Court ruled that the President acted unlawfully in his attempts to terminate the DACA program and deport Dreamers.

Last month, a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll found that a majority of Trump voters (69%) support protecting Dreamers from deportation. Support for Dreamers swells to more than 85% across the American public. Only 12% of Trump voters believe Dreamers should be deported. President Trump should listen to the Supreme Court and the 85% of the American public who support Dreamers instead of embarking on another moral and politically terrible effort to purge DACA recipients from every corner of the nation. The President should abandon his efforts to deport Dreamers immediately.