Sessions Announces End to DACA Program (Audio)

who entered the US illegally as children. Under DACA, those people were shielded from deportation and could get work permits. The program will be phased out, so no one's status will be changed for six at least six months at the period that, in theory at least could let Congress address the status of the Dreamers. With us to talk about the implications of today's announcement is David Beer. He's a policy analyst at the Cato Institute. And Margaret Korean,

he's executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. David, let's just start with the nuts and bolts of this. Tell us how this phase out is going to work. Well, it's gonna work on a sort of rolling basis, so you're gonna have people losing their DOCTA permits um on a ongoing basis, So it's not all going to happen at once in six months. Rather, people's renewals will come up. They get a two year permit to work and live

legally in the United States. That permit will expire at some point, and based on the numbers from the government, UH, you're pretty much gonna have some people being able to stay in their DOCTA status until uh, some people will lose their DOCCA status in and some people will lose their DOCTA status. So it all depends on when you first received your doctor permit. And just David, quickly, just as I know you've looked at the numbers, are are most of the people in the status where they're gonna

lose lose uh, their rights start in six months. So actually you're gonna have about six of the people currently in the program will continue to have status uh through nine teams through all of next year, they will continue to have status and then it will you know, quickly expire after that. So President Trump has signed more than forty executive orders, ranging from stopping immigrants from some Muslim countries from entering the US to stopping transgender people from

serving in the military. So, David, how can the Attorney General Sessions say that President Obama's executive action on DAKA was unconstitutional? Well, it's certainly inconsistent in terms of the theory of executive power. That's being employed in one area is not being employed in in the same way in another area. And Uh, you know, the the DACA program has existed for sinceve so we have over five years

with that program. Other programs of a similar nature existed under the H. W. Bush administration, that George W. Bush administration. You've had these types of deferred action programs for select groups of of unauthorized immigrants going back many years. And it really doesn't seem any different, uh today, except that the administration disagrees with the program on policy merits Mark, let's bring you into this, um. So, Jeff Sessions kept talking today about the rule of law and in his

view that DACCA is unconstitutional. If that's the case, does it does it make sense to let this program go on even for six months. Shouldn't administration have ended it immediately? Well, the administration should have ended it in January when it took over, and the President has pledged to abolish it on day once. So the answer is yes, um, but you also have to deal with practical reality, and what they seem to be doing here is trying to create

a soft landing for the doctor. This is what the sit and also create a grace period for Congress to actually um put together legislation to properly legalize them. So so the answer is yeah, ideally this never should have

existed in the first place. But like any other um unconstitutional usurpation of legislative power by the executive, you have to deal with the facts that have been created and try to unwind the illegal act um, because that's the predn way to deal with it, rather than simply um sort of uh, you know, abolish it altogether turned into a punk. I mean they could, but you know, prudence demands that you have to deal with the facts that you inherit, not the facts that you wish you and inherit.

David in just about thirty seconds. Would this have happened if attorneys general in ten conservative states hadn't threatened a legal challenge to the program, Uh, if it continued beyond September five, giving Trump a political deadline, he was pretty obvious that it would not have happened. And so what you're referring to as a letter led by Texas Attorney General Uh to the administration saying that we will file a lawsuit challenging this deferred action program, the doctor program,

if you do not end it by September five. And here we are on September five, they're announcing the end of the program. The Trump administration has announced it will phase out the Obama Doctor Program, which applied to a hundred thousand young people who entered the US illegally as children. Those so called dreamers have been able to live free from the threat of deportation and with the right to hold down jobs. Here's how Atorney General Jeff Sessions defended

the decision. We are people of compassion, and we are people of law, but there's nothing compassionate about the failure to enforce immigration laws. Enforcing the law saves lives for tax communities and taxpayers, and prevents human suffering. Mark, I want to ask you about those comments from Jeff Session. As you know, a lot of these people came here as very young children. Some of them can't even remember

the country they came from. When I heard him talk about compassion, I heard him talking entirely about people who are legally in the US, and not any of the dreamers,

not compassion towards them. Did you hear anything different, Well, um, yeah, I mean I don't think he was talking about either legal or at le on other words, I think from what you was saying in that comment was that when you have a clear, consistent rules that are that are consistently enforced, you make sure that people abroad know what

to expect. Whereas the reason we have this situation with the doccas is that we have immigration laws that, for various political and financial interests, have made sure that we don't enforce them. So we have laws on the books that are then poorly enforced, and you end up with a situation where, for instance, you have uh, several hundred thousand people who came here as young children, um, some of them teenagers, but a lot of them as young

children who grew up here. Well, the only reason that was even possible is because we let the immigration law go unenforced for so long that people ended up just being able to stay. And the lesson of this whole docta business is that you need to have clear, consistent immigration laws that are enforced so that you don't entice people to come here illegally, and you make sure that those who do come are found and returned expeditiously, rather than um allowed able to stay for years and years

and end up in the kind of situation we keep today. David, this is supposed to be an orderly transition, and yet you have a situation where the DACA recipients are almost in a worse situation than illegal immigrants because all their information has been given to the government and if if they want to get them at some point in the future, they have that information. So and it's also seems very not it doesn't seem very orderly when it's happening on this,

on this every three months. You know, things may happen. It just doesn't seem like it's an orderly process. Well, it's certainly going to be chaotic for the businesses that have to fire over seven twenty thousand people really on a you know, four hundred people week are going to be fired. They're gonna have to, uh, you know, expend

enormous amount of resources trying to replace those people. That money comes directly out of the paychecks of other workers at those businesses as well as the the payments that they received from consumers. So yes, it's it's going to be orderly from the standpoint of the government. Because the government doesn't have to do hardly anything. They can just rely on these businesses to have to go around and

police their workforces and fire these people. I don't think that the Trump administration is going to immediately start targeting all of these uh, doctor recipients, and that's simply because of the fact that they don't have the resources to deport everyone in the United States, and uh, you know, there are enough people that they can catch in other ways that they can really ramp up enforcement without going

after the doctor recipients immediately. Now down the line, certain ones of them will asolutely be disadvantaged as a result of this and be deported. Um, but I don't think it's gonna be a blanket policy of going after them. Mark. The administration left up in the possibility that Congress could act in the six month period to address the status

of the doctor recipients. Do you see any realistic chance that that this Congress could actually put together something that would address this issue from a legislative standpoint, Yeah, I think so. I mean, they didn't just leave the possibility open. That's what that six months. The great period is for is for Congress to get on the stick. If they had done this in January when the President said he was going to do it and given them say to the end of this year, they would have a longer period.

But yeah, I think it's clearly enough time because they don't need to put together some vast thousand page bill like the Gang of Eight fiasco from several years ago. They need legislation that does one thing, and that is legalize the doctas who were already a finite population. They know who they are, and as part of that, mitigate

damage that any amnesty like that would do. So they would have to include and enforcement measures, specifically mandating the de Verify system, which is an online system businesses can use to make sure that people they hire are telling the truth about who they are. And they'd have to get rid of some of the legal immigration categories to prevent the relatives of these amnesty recipients, who knew what they were doing when they came they were adults them

from being able to benefit. I want to give David fifteen seconds to say whether he agrees whether Congress can actually act in this time. Congress can certainly act within this period of time. Uh, it seems unlikely if they're going to try to take up the sort of bargain that Mark has put forward. Okay, I want to thank our guests, Mark Retkorean David Beer talking about the Trump administration's decision to phase out the DACA program. Uh, thanks for being with us on bloomberg Loft.