United States President Donald Trump on Sunday put up a series of tweets on how his government will not support the deal to legalise hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants who arrived in the country as children.
“No more DACA deal,” Trump said on Twitter, referring to the Barack Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA programme, which provides temporary permits for work and study to immigrants who were brought illegally to the US as children.
Trump wanted to scrap the programme from March, but judges stopped the move saying the scheme must remain in place until legal challenges to scrapping it are heard, The Washington Post reported. While the scheme is now closed to new entrants, the existing members – called Dreamers – are allowed to renew their benefits until the programme exists.
Trump, however, has remained aggressive in his opposition to the scheme. He said on Twitter that Republicans should “go to Nuclear Option to pass tough laws [on illegal migrants] NOW”.
“A lot of people are coming in because they want to take advantage of DACA,” Trump claimed – a comment that showed he may not have understood the rules of the DACA scheme, The Washington Post report pointed out.
According to the programme, immigrants must have lived in America since 2007, arrived in the country before they turned 16 and should have been younger than 31 on June 15, 2012 to qualify for benefits under the scheme. No one arriving in the country after that date is eligible, the report said.
Trump also accused Mexico of doing “very little, if not NOTHING”, to stop migrants from crossing its northern border, and threatened to walk away from the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada, AP reported.
Trump said Mexico must “stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, North American Free Trade Agreement. NEED WALL!”
While Trump was earlier open to negotiating with Democrats about Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, he has asked for increased funding to build a wall on the southern border between the US and Mexico, and other hardline immigration measures in exchange, The Guardian reported. Trump’s recent stance about immigrants seems to stem from having little funding for the wall.
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