Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the
end of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which granted work
permits to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children,
on Sept. 5.
(The Washington Post)
THE BIG IDEA: Photographers caught a giddy Jeff Sessions cracking a satisfied smile last week as he prepared to announce that 690,000 undocumented immigrants who had been brought into the United States as minors would no longer be shielded from deportation.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program “is being rescinded,” the attorney general declared in the first line of his statement. “There is nothing compassionate about the failure to enforce immigration laws. … Failure to enforce the laws in the past has put our nation at risk of crime, violence and even terrorism. … The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things, contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences. It also denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens.”
Fact checkers called these and other claims Sessions made about the immigrants known as “dreamers” dubious or outright false. Perhaps that’s why he didn’t take questions afterward. Regardless, the speech was widely covered as a triumph for the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and a sign that he was out of President Trump’s doghouse. Not only did Sessions get the outcome he wanted; he also got to deliver the news from the Justice Department briefing room.
Trump’s DACA decision last week seemed to validate Sessions’s decision to slog on through the summer even after being frozen out of the inner circle. From interviews to tweets, Trump repeatedly attacked his attorney general throughout July as “weak” and “beleaguered.”
The main reason Sessions chose to put up with indignities that might cause most people to quit was because he believed he could make a difference on immigration policy. That has always been his signature issue and animated his two decades in the Senate.
A
cable news report about President Trump's relationship with Democratic
leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi airs as he speaks with reporters
in the press cabin aboard Air Force One en route to Florida
yesterday. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Discussing the exact same group of people that Sessions painted with such a sinister brush one week earlier, Trump tweeted yesterday: “Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military? Really!” Trump tweeted yesterday. “They have been in our country for many years through no fault of their own — brought in by parents at young age.”
President Trump's position on DACA has taken several twists and turns over the years.
(Meg Kelly, Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post)
Here’s how the May 17 meeting went down: The president blames Sessions’s recusal from the Russia investigation for the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. Sessions was in the Oval Office with Vice President Pence, White House Counsel Don McGahn and others to discuss who should be tapped to replace James Comey as FBI director. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein called McGahn during the meeting to say that he was going to name Mueller that evening. Trump erupted when he learned the news.
“An emotional Mr. Sessions told the president he would resign and left the Oval Office,” the Times reports. “In the hours after the Oval Office meeting, however, Mr. Trump’s top advisers intervened to save Mr. Sessions’s job. Mr. Pence; Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s chief strategist at the time; and Reince Priebus, his chief of staff, all advised that accepting Mr. Sessions’s resignation would only sow more chaos inside the administration and rally Republicans in Congress against the president. … The president relented, and eventually returned the resignation letter to Mr. Sessions.”
-- A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment on both the president’s DACA comments and the Times’s story.
-- Rachel Maddow asked Hillary Clinton on her show last night about Trump’s eruption at Sessions. “Well, look, this is a man who engages in humiliation and domination as a tactic of control,” replied the 2016 Democratic nominee, who is giving a flurry of interviews to promote her new book. “I think that's pretty deeply embedded in his character. … I think the goal might well have been, psychologically, to really make Jeff Sessions, who is a very proud man, … more dependent on pleasing the president. … It's all part of his manipulation.”
The status of hundreds of thousands of young
undocumented immigrants are up in the air with the Trump
administration's decision to phase-out DACA and pursue immigration
legislation instead. Here's a look at the "dreamers" who will be
affected.
(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
-- The thrice-married Trump has long struggled with staying loyal, even to people he once loved. As Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker wrote last weekend after the debt ceiling deal, Trump has a long history of broken alliances and agreements: “In business, his personal life, his campaign and now his presidency, Trump has sprung surprises on his allies with gusto. His dealings are frequently defined by freewheeling spontaneity, impulsive decisions and a desire to keep everyone guessing — especially those who assume they can control him. He also repeatedly demonstrates that, while he demands absolute loyalty from others, he is ultimately loyal to no one but himself. … Foreign diplomats euphemistically describe the president as ‘unpredictable.’”
President Trump's decision to work with
Democratic lawmakers to move forward with border security and
protections for dreamers inflamed his conservative base, and raised
questions about his promised border wall.
(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
-- “Trump and Democrats strike DACA deal. Yes? No? Sort of? Trump’s world can be confusing,” by Ashley Parker: “On Wednesday night, in a Blue Room dinner at the White House with Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), the president reached a tentative agreement with the Democratic leaders … But even as Trump careens toward the sort of immigration deal that has eluded previous presidents — the latest capstone to a period of 10 days of sustained bipartisan overtures — the process exhibits certain Trumpian hallmarks: namely, a lack of clarity …
“Often, Trump’s underlings, friends, foes and allies never know quite where he stands — in part because of the president’s penchant for telling his immediate audience exactly what they want to hear in any given moment. People who meet with the president frequently leave buoyed, an optimism punctured by a nagging question mere hours later: What just happened? … On Wednesday evening, as news of the agreement trickled out, Hill staffers sat glued to Twitter trying to discern that very query as aides to both sides scrambled to explain what, in the end, turned out to be disagreements that were largely semantics.” (Read Ashley’s full story for a blow-by-blow on the confusion that reigned in Washington yesterday.)
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) spoke on
Sept. 14 about President Trump’s discussion with Democrats on DACA and
border security.
(Reuters)
“Specific talks on border security are expected to begin in the coming days, Schumer said. He and Pelosi said border security measures in the final agreement could include drones, sensor technology, road repairs and other strategies that were included in a bipartisan bill in 2013 that instructed federal officials to draft a plan ensuring apprehension of 90 percent of all illegal border-crossers within five years."
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer
(D-N.Y.) was unintentionally recorded on the Senate floor saying Trump
"likes us, he likes me anyway."
(C-SPAN)
Democrats decried the Trump administration's
decision to wind down Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, while many
Republicans agreed that DACA was an "overreach."
(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
“Polling suggests that Trump has more room to maneuver with his base on the question of dreamers than on other planks of his immigration platform. An analysis of the 2016 presidential election by Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner found that among 2016 Trump voters, 67 percent supported building a southern border wall, 80 percent said speaking English was ‘very important’ to being American, and 80 percent were opposed to letting Syrian refugees into the United States. But among the same voters, 68 percent said child migrants brought illegally who have been here 10 years and have graduated high school should be allowed to stay in the country. ‘That’s what the White House is wrestling with right now,’ says Jim McLaughlin, a campaign pollster for Trump who still consults with the White House.”
President Trump spoke to reporters on Sept.
14 about his deal with Democrats on DACA and immigration reform, saying
"we're moving very rapidly on the wall."
(The Washington Post)
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