Trump attacked for removing Obama’s DACA order as ‘cruel’

President Trump ordered an end to the Obama-era program that shields young undocumented immigrants from deportation, calling it an “amnesty-first approach” and urging Congress to pass a replacement before he begins phasing out its protections in six months.

The Trump administration Wednesday morning sought to clarify President Donald Trump’s promise to “revisit” the DACA program if Congress does not meet his deadline: “Nobody should be committing the president’s time to this six months from now. Let’s have Congress act,” Kellyanne Conway told Fox News Wednesday morning, accusing Capitol Hill of “punting these issues to the executive branch” by failing to make law in the past.

TIME Magazine covers features Illegal Immigration Photo/TIME

“Congress should be acting on this. They either can choose to act or not to act. But it’s congress who makes the laws in this country,” she said. “If they feel that strongly about this, they should act.”

The Trump administration announced that it would discontinue DACA, a program that granted work permits to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children, on grounds that it was unconstitutional and soon to be struck down by courts.

Protests broke out in front of the White House and the Justice Department and in cities across the country soon after Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s announcement on Tuesday. Democrats and some Republicans, business executives, college presidents and immigration activists condemned the move as a coldhearted and shortsighted effort that was unfair to the young immigrants and could harm the economy.

“This is a sad day for our country,” Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, wrote on his personal page. “It is particularly cruel to offer young people the American dream, encourage them to come out of the shadows and trust our government, and then punish them for it.”

Former President Barack Obama, who had warned that any threat to the program would prompt him to speak out, called his successor’s decision “wrong,” “self-defeating” and “cruel.”

“Whatever concerns or complaints Americans may have about immigration in general, we shouldn’t threaten the future of this group of young people who are here through no fault of their own, who pose no threat, who are not taking away anything from the rest of us,” Obama wrote on Facebook.