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Saturday, August 26, 2017

Is This Early Bargaining -- or Is It For Real?

There are news reports that President Trump will rescind the Obama DACA executive order next week.  DACA is Obama's program that let illegal aliens who came to this country under the age of 16 and who are not in trouble with the law to get work permits and to stay here with no threat of deportation.  It's a program that most Americans support (according to polls -- so who really knows).  The program, however, has a major problem; most likely the program itself is illegal.  American law provides that illegals are to be deported no matter how old they were when they came to this country.  No president has the authority to change the law absent an act of Congress, and Congress never acted here.  Obama claimed that he was just exercising prosecutorial discretion, but that would never stand up in the Supreme Court.  Prosecutorial discretion deals with individual cases, not the altering in one move of how two million people will be treated.  That requires Congress.

During the campaign, candidate Trump said that he would rescind all of Obama's immigration executive orders.  The only one that he has not rescinded is DACA.  The President has also said that he has great sympathy for these people who came to this country as children, especially since many of them do not even have memories of their countries of origin.

All of this makes me wonder if this announcement is just early bargaining for a big deal on immigration.  The deal would provide legislation that made DACA into actual law and also provided full funding for the border wall and expedited its construction.  Funding for border security would also be increased so that the additional agents who have been promised can actually all be hired.  There might be some other provisions to the deal, but this would be the basic outline.  President Trump's announcement that DACA is about to go would then just be designed to make clear to Democrats that if they don't get behind the border wall, they will soon see the DACA people getting tossed out of the country.

A proposed deal of this sort would put the Democrats in a difficult position.  After all, their main problem with the border wall and increased enforcement has been that it will not work.  Even most Democrats don't take the position that they want an unprotected border over which thousands of people and tons of drugs travel illegally day after day.  Opposing the deal would put the Dems in the position of valuing twenty billion dollars more than the keeping the DACA people in the country.  For the President, this deal would get him off the hook on having to deal with DACA.  He could tell his strong anti-illegal immigration supporters that he kept these DACA people in the country in order to make sure that the border got fully secured.  Most of them would accept that too.  Further, DACA does not provide citizenship, just the right to be here legally.  Trump could then restate his position that only those who come here legally have the right to become citizens.

Of course, since one is never quite sure what is going on based upon media articles, it may be that the President is not about to rescind DACA or, alternatively, he is about to do that and is not looking for a deal.

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