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Sessions announces end of DACA

Andrew Harnik / AP

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Tuesday that the Trump administration is ending DACA, the Obama-era program to shield some illegal immigrants, who arrived in the U.S. as children, from deportation.

In an accompanying press release, the Department of Homeland Security's Acting Secretary, Elaine Duke, will say that no people currently on DACA "will be impacted before March 5, 2018, nearly six months from now, so Congress can have time to deliver on appropriate legislative solutions."

"However," says Duke, "I want to be clear that no new initial requests or associated applications filed after today will be acted on."

Axios obtained the DHS press release from outside sources and did not receive it from the department, so we are not abiding by the embargo instructions: ("embargoed until after AG remarks are delivered.")

  • According to the DHS release, "yesterday, Attorney General Sessions sent a letter to Acting Secretary Duke articulating his legal determination that DACA 'was effectuated by the previous administration through executive action, without proper statutory authority and with no established end-date, after Congress' repeated rejection of proposed legislation that would have accomplished a similar result. Such an open-ended circumvention of immigration laws was an unconstitutional exercise of authority by the Executive Branch.'
  • "The letter further stated that because DACA 'has the same legal and constitutional defects that the courts recognized as to DAPA, it is likely that potentially imminent litigation would yield similar results with respect to DACA.'
  • "Nevertheless, in light of the administrative complexities associated with ending the program, he recommended that the Department wind down the program in an efficient and orderly fashion, and his office has reviewed the terms on which the Department will do so.
  • "Based on guidance from Attorney General Sessions, and the likely result of potentially imminent litigation, Acting Secretary Elaine Duke today issued a memo formally rescinding the June 15, 2012 memorandum that created DACA, and initiating an orderly wind down of the program."