Welcome to WHAT NOW, a morning round-up of the news/fresh horrors that await you today.
Donald Trump’s administration is expected to announce today that it’s ending DACA, the Obama-era program shielding young undocumented people brought into the country as children—and Trump seems very excited about the whole thing.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is scheduled to make an announcement about the future of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program today at 11 a.m. (He’s not taking questions.) But after initial reports that the immigration hard-liners in Trump’s inner circle—Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon among them—won out in their appeals to end DACA, Politico reported Monday night that Trump’s essentially punting the matter to Congress by giving them six months to come up with a legislative solution.
The president seemed to confirm as much in a Tuesday morning tweet whose exclamation point signaled his chirpiness at the prospect of throwing the lives of 800,000 people into inhumane turmoil:
He also tweeted this fun preview overnight:
There are already reports of a lot of terrible deals with the devil in the works, including senior House Republicans floating a compromise to codify DACA in exchange for securing funding for Trump’s border wall.
Any move to end DACA will cast its recipients, who came out of the shadows to work and live in the U.S. without fear of deportation, into immediate uncertainty.
Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, a progressive immigration reform group, framed the stakes this way to The New York Times: “The federal government has the cellphone and home address of every DACA recipient.”
“They grew up here, they work at nearly every major company in America, serve in the military and many are working on recovery efforts in Texas,” he also said. “If DACA is repealed and no permanent legislation passed, they will all be fired and our government will begin the large-scale deportation of people raised in the United States, using information they volunteered to the government with the promise it would never be used against them or their families.”
WHAT ELSE?
- Did you forget that Hillary Clinton, failed presidential candidate, has a book about the 2016 AND MUCH MORE coming out in mere days? Anyway, please kill me:
- A “crush of interviews, subpoenas and testimony” is expected to rock Trump’s inner circle this fall, the Associated Press reports, as special counsel Robert Mueller’s wide-ranging probe into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia continues.
- As Texans start to dig out from the wreckage of Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma is barreling toward the Caribbean—and it’s already at Category 5 strength.