Trump renews effort to wind down DACA while also giving Dreamers one year of deportation protection

The Trump administration is expected Tuesday to announce its review of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that will likely allow so-called "Dreamers" to renew their deportation protections for a year while the White House revises its approach to likely wind down the program.

In a White House call with reporters, a senior administration laid out how the DACA review would unfold, with a stated goal of reducing "smuggling and illegal crossing" that the official said was encouraged by DACA.

The White House said it plans to continue its existing policy of refusing new DACA applicants – a decision in place since 2017. However, the administration will extend eligibility by a year for those DACA immigrants who faced deportation, provided they have no criminal record.

Last Month, the Supreme Court ruled against President Trump's effort to end the Obama-era program. 

In a 5-4 ruling last month, in which Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court's liberal bloc, the high court ruled that the administration did not follow the correct procedures in seeking to rescind DACA, a policy unilaterally established by President Obama in a 2012 memo that entitles some who arrived in the U.S. illegally as children, or Dreamers, to work eligibility and deferrals of deportation proceedings for renewable two-year periods.

"I think the legal justification for saying this was an unlawful exercise of executive power is fairly clear," the senior administration official told Just the News on Tuesday. "What the court would like us to do is to review materials, and to exhaustively consider the various policy inputs that would go into the formation – that went into the formation of DACA  – and would go into the formation of any wind down policy."

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions last month expressed his frustration with the court ruling, saying it undermined the rule of law by allowing people to illegally demand they remain in the United States even though they'd broken the law by entering the country.

"And yet somehow, the court eviscerates what Congress intended, what the American people intended, and common sense, really, to say that even if you came as a teenager, you never have to be deported," Sessions said in an interview with former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. "That's what the Obama order basically did. We're getting to a point where good American people are losing confidence in the efficacy of the law, the reality of their democratic representatives passing a law, which gets to be altered by an oligarchy on the Supreme Court that always — when the dust settles —advances a liberal social agenda and blocks the actions of conservatives."

"I think the attorney general's legal reasoning isn't one that I would quibble with," the senior Trump administration official also said, when asked about Sessions' statement. "What's important here to note is a program that was not enacted through a regulatory process, consistent with the APA [The Administrative Procedure Act.] So it went through no formal rulemaking, and is neither supported by a statutory underpinning. It lacks sufficient justification in law to extend a benefit under the INA Immigration and Naturalization Act. So we have a program designed through an internal department memo contradicting existing statutory law and extending a benefit to a group of individuals that Congress, never contemplated to do so."