NEW YORK: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and the state´s attorney general on Monday vowed to sue President Donald Trump if he scraps a programme shielding from deportation immigrants who came to the United States illegally as children.
Reuters reported Trump plans to announce on Tuesday he will end the programme but will give the US Congress six months to craft legislation to replace it, citing sources familiar with the situation said.
Cuomo said "the president´s action would upend the lives of hundreds of thousands of young people who have only ever called America their home."Dubbed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the 2012 programme grants a conditional two-year residency to minors and facilitates their stay on American soil after meeting further qualifications.
Sources within the Trump administration said that the president had already made up his mind and was going to make an announcement on Tuesday. Before taking action, however, Trump was giving Congress six month to come up with an alternative to the programme, which protects from deportation nearly 800,000 young men and women often referred to as “Dreamers” and allows them to work legally.
Dreamers, a name derived from the 2001 DREAM Act to protect alien minors, still make up a fraction of the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants that currently live in the US. During last year’s presidential campaign, Trump pledged that he would deport all illegal immigrants through staging a nationwide crackdown and blocking legal loopholes.
Although he has been able to attract Republican support on some of his previous anti-immigration efforts, the president still faces stiff bipartisan opposition on repealing DACA. In March, the Department of Homeland Security unveiled plans to separate women and children sneaking together into the country, in a bid to discouraging mothers from migrating to the US. Since his inauguration, Trump has taken several controversial steps against immigration by ordering a wall on the border with Mexico and authorizing a crackdown on US cities that shield illegal immigrants. The House under Democratic control passed a Dream Act in 2010 but it died in the Senate. Since Republicans retook control of the House in late 2010, it has taken an increasingly hard line on immigration.
House Republicans refused to act on the Senate's comprehensive immigration bill in 2013. Two years later, a GOP border security bill languished because of objections from conservatives. —Reuters