By Meredith Rogers
President Trump has decided to turn his words into action by announcing that he will indeed rescind the controversial policy of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA. While this was one of his campaign promises from the start, many people from his own party were uncertain he would actually go through with it.
It came as a lesser of a surprise to his core electorate on the far right, who have strongly opposed this policy from the start.
Trump made lots of promises during his campaign, number of which he had no plans to implement once he came to power. So why is the rescission happening now? It would be fair to say that both, the threat from 11 chief law officers to sue the administration in June 2017, as well as, his dwindling popularity (his approval rating stood at just below 40 percent at the time), are to blame.
When the Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in early September that the program is being repealed, he made no secret about his stance on this matter. According to Sessions, all the DACA recipients were “lawbreakers and a threat to hard working native-born US citizens.”
He did fail to address any of the issues regarding the possible negative impact this move would have on the US economy. Several reports have since come out estimating the cost of the mass deportation at more than $8 billion. Furthermore, some analysts say that the overall burden for the American economy in the coming decade would be immense. Some figures show it to be as high as $480 billion.
Sessions did specify that the implementation of this act would be suspended for at least half a year until Congress takes a clear stance on this matter. This, however, offers little or no hope for the 800,000 DACA-eligible individuals who face deportation after those six months.
Trumps decision to end DACA was received by many Democrats and some Republicans by lots of criticism and protests. To many of them, it makes no sense to deport people who have come to the United States not of their own free will, but because of their parents’ decision to break the law. The Dreamers have grown up here and know no other country as their home. Should they pay the price for their parents’ mistakes?
Ending DACA matters and not only to the countless families that are directly impacted. The whole economy would suffer. While it may send a strong signal to those seeking to come to the US illegally in the future, it certainly tarnishes the country’s reputation as the defender of human rights.
Meredith Rogers is a blogger, and a health writer based in USA.
