President Trump on Wednesday called on the Supreme Court to strike down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, ahead of the top court’s November hearing on the legality of Trump’s termination of the Obama-era program.
In a pair of tweets, Trump said that if the DACA is upheld it would give the president “extraordinary powers” while saying that if the program is struck down, he thinks Congress would make a deal to “benefit DACA.”
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), a top supporter of immigration reform, told The Hill that he agrees with the president’s vision.
“If DACA was eliminated, the urgency and pressure would mount to get it done,” said Diaz-Balart.
As part of its busy fall term, the Supreme Court is taking on three cases on the legality of Trump’s September 2017 rescission of the immigration program.
In all three cases, lower courts decided Trump had acted illegally in canceling the program that Obama started to grant immigration benefits to so-called Dreamers — undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country as minors.
In his Wednesday tweets, Trump repeated a claim that Obama had himself said DACA was an unconstitutional program.
Obama enacted DACA in 2012 after he failed to get the DREAM Act through Congress; that version of the DREAM Act would have granted Dreamers the permanent benefits granted by DACA in two-year increments.
“President Obama said that he did not have the right to sign DACA, that it will never hold up in court. He signed it anyway!” wrote Trump.
According to PolitiFact, Obama didn’t say he lacked the power to enact DACA, rather that he thought a permanent solution would be preferable and that DACA was based on prosecutorial discretion, rather than a modification of immigration law.