White House Watch: Trump and Sessions to End DACA

The 2012 DACA executive order from President Obama was designed to circumvent Congress on this peculiar gap in immigration law—many of these accidental illegal aliens know only the United States, but couldn’t apply for legal status.* It led more than 700,000 people to provide their information in exchange for “deferred action” on green cards and the ability receive work permits.

But for many Republicans, DACA was a usurpation of legislative authority that gave de facto amnesty to these young people and, because of the regime of chain migration, to their families. As a candidate, Donald Trump pledged to end what he called “one of the most unconstitutional actions ever undertaken by a president.”

Tuesday’s announcement of the DACA rollback will come not from President Trump and the White House but from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is likely to announce a six-month window before its implementation. According to Eliana Johnson of Politico, who first reported the new policy, it was Sessions who helped convince Trump to end the program. Maggie Haberman of the New York Times says Sessions told Trump the Justice Department would not defend DACA.

Sessions and his former aide Stephen Miller (now a top White House aide) are in the driver’s seat on the new policy, the Times reports. That’s a better sign than any that come March 2018, those illegal immigrants registered under DACA could start getting deported. But chief of staff John Kelly, until recently the secretary of Homeland Security, is among those in the West Wing looking for a way to solve the problem legislatively.

Already even conservative senators such as James Lankford and Tom Cotton are saying they’d support legislation that gave legal status to those brought illegally to the country as children—though in Cotton’s case, the price could be support for his bill to limit legal immigration. There seems to be a willingness among many Republicans in Congress (though certainly not all) to find a fix before the six-month deadline hits. What will determine the outcome for DACA recipients will depend on whether Kelly and the White House can solve the collective action problem on Capitol Hill—and whether President Trump really wants to see a legislative fix or whether he’s more in line with Sessions and Miller.

The split within the White House on DACA is in many ways a split within the president himself. Trump’s political brand is so defined by immigration that it seems as though any form of amnesty would be a nonstarter. But Trump’s own views may not be so purist. Andrew Kaczynski of CNN unearthed a 2011 Fox News appearance by Trump where the future president said it was “compassion” to allow illegal immigrant families living in the United States to remain. He admitted doing so would be amnesty.

“But how do you tell a family that’s been here for 25 years to get out?” Trump said at the time.

Trump Tweet of the (Labor) Day

Americans woke up Sunday morning to news of yet another North Korean escalation: The Kim regime had successfully completed their sixth test of a nuclear weapon, hours after boasting that the North had the capability to attach such a bomb to an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Unusual seismic activity alerted South Korea to the test, which the North Korean government took credit for hours later. A South Korean lawmaker said their readings indicated the bomb was roughly five times more powerful than the one the United States dropped on Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

This provocation from the Kim regime is the latest test for the Trump administration’s foreign policy resolve. In mid-August, after North Korea backed down from threats to attack a U.S. base in Guam, Trump praised Kim Jong Un for making “a very wise and well-reasoned decision.” But North Korea has since continued to escalate, including flying a missile over Japan last week.

At each step U.S. officials have pledged to raise diplomatic and economic pressure to punish the rogue regime. But despite the rhetoric and multiple rounds of U.N. sanctions, no one has stopped North Korea from quietly doing business with Russian and Chinese companies.

On Sunday, President Trump suggested the United States might go after that support network by ending all trade with any country who does business with the Kim regime.

The president’s tweets prompted an angry response from the Chinese government. A spokesman told reporters that China would not accept “a situation in which on the one hand we work to resolve this issue peacefully but on the other hand our own interests are subject to sanctions and jeopardized.”

“This is neither objective nor fair,” the spokesman added.

Essay of the Day—In the new issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Andrew Ferguson pens a beautifully written meditation on E.B. White and seeing your heroes up close.

The middle class is having a comeback under President Trump. So writes Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson, who looked at the polling data and finds renewed economic optimism. Samuelson calls the comeback of the middle class the year’s “most underreported story.”

Since the 2008 financial crisis, Gallup had found fewer Americans were counting themselves as middle-class. “As late as 2015, the country was almost evenly split between those in the middle and upper-middle classes (51 percent) and those in the working and lower classes (48 percent),” Samuelson writes. “No more. In its latest poll on class identity, done in June, Gallup found that 62 percent put themselves in the broadly defined middle class, while only 36 percent classified themselves as working class or lower class. The shifts, said Gallup, began in 2016 and demonstrated ‘that subjective social class identification has stabilized close to the prevailing pattern observed before 2009.’”

Read the whole thing.

You Can’t Make It Up—“Mario is no longer a plumber, Nintendo reveals.”

Song of the Day—“Why Can’t This Be Love” by Van Halen.

Correction: The article originally stated that DACA was a 2015 executive order.