Who are the people currently holding deferments? They are young men and women like Antonio Cisnero, born in Acapulco and now living in Pomona, who is studying at Cal State L.A. (while working full time to pay for his education) for a career in biomedical engineering. Maria Lizeth Ruiz was born in Mexico City and now lives in Costa Mesa; she wants to become a court interpreter. Eunsoo Jeong, who came from South Korea to California as a 13-year-old, used DACA status to graduate from college and get a job in a Burbank animation lab. Jesus Contreras arrived in the U.S. from Mexico when he was 6, and he spent the last week doing his job in Houston — as a paramedic helping save people from flooding associated with Hurricane Harvey. 

 President Trump is taking flak from all sides for ending his predecessor’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, thus putting some 800,000 young immigrants—so-called Dreamers—in legal limbo. Though the President and Barack Obama share responsibility for instigating the crisis, Mr. Trump and Congress now have an obligation to fix it and spare these productive young adults from harm they don’t deserve. 
 
 *** 
 
 Mr. Trump was at his worst during the campaign when he assailed DACA as an “unconstitutional executive amnesty,”... 

 The Trump administration announced the end of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, on a delayed, rolling basis. The decision is the right one. DACA is an extralegal amnesty at odds with our constitutional system. It has to go. But the delayed fuse gives Congress an opportunity to pass legislation dealing with this sub-set of the illegal population. 
 
 Instituted in 2012 by President Obama, DACA provided a functional amnesty to illegal immigrants under the age of 37 who applied to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for deferred status. The program was Obama’s response to Congress repeatedly rejecting the DREAM Act, under the novel theory that the president can in effect impose legislation if Congress declines to pass it. The administration justified DACA as a mere exercise of prosecutorial discretion, the same absurd cover story that the courts rejected in the case of Obama’s other unilateral amnesty, known as DAPA. 
 
 Candidate Trump had promised to rescind DACA on Day One. But the president hesitated to follow through. Its beneficiaries are sympathetic, some having grown up here and having known no other country. That Trump initially balked at ending DACA is therefore understandable. He tried to strike a prudent balance, given the circumstances. Currently pending applications for deferred status will still be considered, and existing work permits due to expire between now and March 5, 2018, can still be renewed for a two-year period. But no new applications will be accepted after today and no renewals considered for permits expiring after March 5 of next year. 
 
 Trump is, appropriately, putting the onus on Congress for passing a legal version of the program. In theory, there should be a deal to be had, a DREAM Act–style amnesty in exchange for tightening in the rest of the immigration system. But Democrats may, cynically, conclude that they don’t need to negotiate, instead insisting on a simple codification of DACA and daring the Trump administration to really bring an end to the program. They also may figure they can divide congressional Republicans on the issue. Those in the party who favored the Gang of Eight immigration bill haven’t gone away, and they appear to be in a panic over DACA and eager for any deal, even a fig leaf. 
 
 Merely getting some funding for Trump’s border wall falls into that category. Trading a permanent amnesty for a one-time appropriation for a border wall that is mostly symbolism would be deal-making that conforms to the worst stereotype of feckless congressional Republicans. Unfortunately, the White House might be willing to go along with such a deal because the wall is Trump’s idée fixe, even though it is considerably less important than other enforcement measures. 
 
 Republicans should aim to trade a version of the DREAM Act for mandatory E-Verify for new hires on a nationwide basis and, ideally, for a significant piece of the RAISE Act, a bill recently introduced by Senators Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) and David Perdue (R., Ga.). Most relevant is the Cotton-Perdue provision to curtail chain migration, wherein recent immigrants sponsor their relatives, who sponsor their relatives, and so on. Congress should want to avoid making DACA recipients the next link in chain migration. 
 
 To get anything like this, Republicans will have to be stalwart and adroit, and the Trump White House will have to have a clear legislative strategy. We hope today wasn’t simply the beginning of the process of codifying DACA, with no meaningful enforcement in exchange. 
 
 READ MORE: 
 
 To End DACA, Follow the Constitution 
 
 The Politics of the DACA Fix 
 
 A DACA Deal 
 
 — Get insight from the best conservative writers delivered to your inbox; sign up for National Review Online’s newsletters today. 

 President Trump didn’t even have the guts to do the job himself. Instead, he hid in the shadows and sent his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to do the dirty work of telling the country that the administration would no longer shield from deportation 800,000 young undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children. 
 
 Mr. Sessions, a longtime anti-immigrant hard-liner, was more than up to the task. In a short, disingenuous speech, he said a program set up by President Barack Obama in 2012 — known as DACA, for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — was a lawless policy that “yielded terrible humanitarian consequences” and denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of American citizens. (Mr. Trump echoed these claims in a statement released by the White House.) Mr. Sessions called DACA “an unconstitutional exercise of authority” and said “failure to enforce the laws in the past has put our nation at risk of crime, violence and terrorism.” 
 
 False, false, false and false. 
 
 DACA recipients are not threats to public safety or national security; to the contrary, they must have a nearly spotless record to be eligible in the first place. They do not receive legal status in this country, only a two-year, renewable deferral of deportation along with a work permit and eligibility for other government benefits down the road. And they are not taking jobs from native-born Americans, whose declining levels of employment can be chalked up to other factors. 
 
 As for the policy’s legality, there’s no question that the president has the authority to set immigration-enforcement priorities. Presidents of both parties have done that for decades, and President Obama did it by focusing on people with criminal records and not on those brought to this country as children. For most of this latter group, the United States is the only home they’ve ever known. About 9 in 10 are working taxpayers, and deporting them could reduce the gross domestic product by over $400 billion over the next decade. 

 PRESIDENT TRUMP found a facile way to deflect blame for his decision to terminate the program that provides safe harbor for the "dreamers," some 800,000 young immigrants brought illegally to this country as minors. Lacking any policy conviction — as a candidate, Mr. Trump vowed to end the program, then once in office said the "incredible" young dreamers should breathe easy — he ducked, dodged and shunted the issue to Congress. 
 
 Agreed: Congress should have dealt with the dreamers years ago, and several times tried to do so. It failed, which is why President Barack Obama established Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which grants two-year renewable reprieves from deportation, along with work permits. Mr. Trump did not kill the program outright, which may have disappointed some of his hardcore supporters. But he handed it a slow-motion death sentence, unless Congress can break its long-standing deadlock on the issue. 
 
 The president didn't have the spine to announce his decision himself. He shuffled it to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, an anti-immigration extremist who seemed to relish sticking a knife in DACA. Mr. Trump told reporters Tuesday that he hoped "Congress will be able to help" the dreamers "and do it properly." But his written statement — "young Americans have dreams too" — was a study in ambiguity. While saying the dreamers wouldn't be first in line for deportation, Mr. Trump put them on a path to lose jobs, educational opportunities, and the ability to lead open and unafraid lives. 
 
 Tossing red meat to the administration's hardcore nativist base, Mr. Sessions falsely asserted that DACA amounts to unconstitutional "amnesty." In fact, DACA is a stopgap that conferred no legal status on its recipients. And despite the administration's contention that it is legally indefensible, predicting how the Supreme Court would rule on it is a guessing game. Presidents have long exercised broad discretion over the enforcement of immigration law and deportations — a matter of necessity given finite resources. 
 
 By calling attention to the plight of a sympathetic group of generally hard-working, law-abiding young people, DACA has clarified for many Americans just how senseless it would be to deport hundreds of thousands of them. That's one reason Congress should act to extend their protections. 
 
 Another is that the dreamers are a boon to the U.S. economy. They are English speakers; nearly all are in school, college or the workforce; and tens of thousands of them are working toward a bachelor's degree or higher. Most own cars and pay taxes. Many have bought houses and apartments; several thousand have even started businesses. Mr. Sessions is wrong to claim that the dreamers take jobs from Americans. In fact, the unemployment rate has plummeted in the five years since the dreamers have been eligible for work permits. 
 
 Mr. Trump's order is an assault on economic logic. By subverting the employment and educational prospects of so many promising young people, Mr. Trump has sapped their earnings and purchasing power, withdrawn their college prospects and imperiled their jobs. That's why more than 300 top executives of some of the largest U.S. corporations asked him not to rescind DACA. Now, unless Congress acts, the United States will suffer along with the dreamers. 

 President Donald Trump tweeted Tuesday evening that he expected Congress to “legalize” the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) that he had just rescinded Tuesday morning, or he would “revisit” the issue. 
 
 Congress now has 6 months to legalize DACA (something the Obama Administration was unable to do). If they can’t, I will revisit this issue! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 6, 2017 
 
 Earlier in the day, shortly before he made the official announcement that DACA would end after a six-month delay, President Trump tweeted that Congress should “get ready to do [its] job,” leaving the outcome of that process ambiguous. 
 
 As things stood then, if Congress failed to pass legislation to protect the so-called “Dreamers” — illegal aliens who were brought to the U.S. as children — then DACA would simply end, and its beneficiaries would be potentially subject to deportation. 
 
 That gave Trump maximum leverage to demand concessions — border wall funding, for example — in exchange for any legalization that Congress would offer, and to limit the extent of that legalization. 
 
 Trump was aided, ironically, by Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), who said of Trump’s decision on DACA: “We are now in a countdown toward deportation.” 
 
 That was almost certainly hyperbole — the Trump administration does not want to deport the “Dreamers,” at least not most of them — but in creating alarm for the sake of the 24-hour news cycle, Durbin foolishly gave Trump the upper hand in the negotiations to follow. 
 
 And then, somehow, Trump gave it back. 
 
 By tweeting that he expects Congress to legalize DACA, he risks alienating those of his supporters who want him to end the program. 
 
 Trump’s base might be willing to accept a compromise on DACA at the end of six months, but not at the start. 
 
 Furthermore, Trump may have backed himself into signing whatever form of DACA Congress passes, even if it is more generous than the original DACA policy. 
 
 Trump can still extricate himself from his blunder by setting out clear conditions under which he would veto a DACA bill. 
 
 First, Congress would have to fund the border wall — and potentially tax remittances by foreign workers so that Mexico pays for it. Second, there can be no offer of legal permanent residency to DACA recipients until the border is fully secure. Third, there could be no “path to citizenship,” pending broader immigration reform. 
 
 Without clear limits to what the president will accept, Congress’s debate over DACA will slouch towards amnesty — prodded by media hysteria, Democrats’ lust for votes, and GOP fear of the donor class. That is doubly true if Trump is seen to be cheering for a DACA-like outcome. 
 
 Whatever caused Tuesday evening’s DACA tweet — perhaps a loss of nerve in a Bannon-less West Wing — it was an error from which Trump must extricate himself, and soon. 
 
 Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
– President Trump's DACA decision—to end protection for young immigrants brought to the country illegally as kids and punt the issue back to Congress—is a hot topic on the nation's editorial pages. Here's a sampling: Wall Street Journal: The newspaper complains that Trump was "at his worst" when he went after Dreamers in the campaign but thinks that Obama was "at his most cynical" when he instituted DACA on iffy legal grounds. The editors see Obama's action as a calculated political decision, one that "teed up this moral crisis." Also at its "worst"? The GOP for making this issue a priority now. Regardless of all that, it's now up to Congress to protect these young immigrants, and to do so without using them as political weapons. New York Times: Its editorial accuses Trump of "cowardice" for sending Jeff Sessions out to do the "dirty work" of announcing the move and suggests Trump doesn't even understand the implications of the decision. "DACA is morally right, legally sound and fiscally smart policy," the editors write. "It was also the only humane choice Mr. Obama had in the face of Congress’s failure to pass any meaningful immigration reform in the last two decades." National Review: Trump made the right move because "DACA is an extralegal amnesty at odds with our constitutional system," write the editors. They urge Republican lawmakers to use the next six months wisely to win border-security measures from Democrats (such as E-verify for all hires nationwide) in exchange for codifying DACA. Washington Post: The editors call the move "heartless" in terms of the Dreamers but says it could hurt the US economy, too. "By subverting the employment and educational prospects of so many promising young people, Mr. Trump has sapped their earnings and purchasing power, withdrawn their college prospects and imperiled their jobs," they write. No wonder so many corporate execs are in opposition. "Now, unless Congress acts, the United States will suffer along with the dreamers." Breitbart: It's not an editorial, but a post at the site suggests that Trump blew it when he tweeted Tuesday night that he would "revisit" the issue if Congress failed to legalize DACA. Trump just gave away his leverage and ticked off supporters who would be happy to see DACA end, period. "Trump’s base might be willing to accept a compromise on DACA at the end of six months, but not at the start," writes Joel Pollak. Los Angeles Times: "Pure cruelty" declares the editorial's headline. "What public good is achieved by yanking such people from their homes, families and communities and sending them to countries where they are strangers and often don’t even speak the language?" The fix: Congress must resurrect the DREAM Act and give these youths a path to citizenship.