DACA Is Unconstitutional, as Obama Admitted
President Donald Trump has caught a lot of heat for rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program with a six-month wind-down. Few people seem aware that he's ending an administrative amnesty for illegal aliens that President Barack Obama lacked the constitutional and legal authority to implement.
How do we know? Because even Obama admitted it – repeatedly.
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."
Yet in 2012, he did it anyway. He put DACA in place to provide pseudo-legal status to illegal aliens brought to the U.S. as minors, including as teenagers. He promised them that they wouldn't be deported and provided them with work authorizations and access to Social Security and other government benefits.
And he did this despite the fact that the immigration laws passed by Congress do not give the president the ability to do this. Indeed, Congress specifically rejected bills to provide such benefits.
As Attorney General Jeff Sessions pointed out this week, DACA "contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences." Since most DACA beneficiaries are now adults, "it also denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens," Sessions said.
The unconstitutionality of Obama's actions were confirmed when Obama tried to implement a second, similar program in 2014 called the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents program, or DAPA. Like DACA, DAPA provided an administrative amnesty for illegal aliens who came to the U.S. as adults and gave them work authorizations and access to government benefits.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a nationwide injunction against DAPA, which the Supreme Court allowed to stand. As the Fifth Circuit said, the fact that the president declined to enforce the law and remove illegal aliens "does not transform presence deemed unlawful by Congress into lawful presence and confer eligibility for otherwise unavailable benefits based on that change."
broke the law / Unconstitutional
but yet now Trump 'lacks' authority to undo this illegal / unconstitutional action