the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt ten)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

For the first seven months of his presidency, Trump vacillated on canceling DACA, the highly popular program that protected from deportation some seven hundred thousand people who had come to the US as undocumented children. Obama had instituted DACA in June 2012, through an executive action, and Trump had campaigned against it, then reversed himself, in a rare acknowledgement of how extreme it would look to target such a sympathetic population. “We are going to deal with DACA with heart,” he said, after taking office. “To me, it’s one of the most difficult subjects I have, because you have these incredible kids.” Later, he added, “We love Dreamers.” Miller, however, had always been hostile to the policy. In an email to an editor at Breitbart, he said that expanding “the foreign-born share” of the US workforce was an instance of immigration being used “to replace existing demographics.”

In September 2017, under pressure from Miller and other White house advisers, Trump agreed to cancel DACA, setting a six-month deadline for Congress to find a legislative solution. He left the announcement to Sessions, who delivered it on the Tuesday morning after Labor Day. At the press conference, Sessions called Dreamers by a different name. They were, he said, “A group of illegal aliens” who were taking jobs away from citizens, contributing to “lawlessness,” and threatening the country’s “unsurpassed legal heritage.”