WASHINGTON — President Trump said Friday that he will once again attempt to end a program designed to protect young immigrants from deportation, one day after the Supreme Court said his earlier efforts to do so were arbitrary and improper.
In September 2017, Mr. Trump moved to terminate the Obama-era program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, making good on a 2016 campaign promise in which he called the program an illegal executive amnesty. On Thursday, the court said the administration had not followed the rules required to end the program, allowing it to remain in place for now.
In a tweet Friday morning, Mr. Trump vowed to try again.
“We will be submitting enhanced papers shortly in order to properly fulfill the Supreme Court’s ruling & request of yesterday,” Mr. Trump wrote.
Cracking down on illegal immigration was at the heart of the president’s first campaign, and Mr. Trump has spent much of the last three years waging an assault on the nation’s immigration system in an attempt to reduce the number of foreigners in the United States.
The decision to end DACA was a centerpiece of those efforts. Put in place by former President Barack Obama, the program allows about 800,000 young immigrants who were brought to the United States as children to live and work legally without the threat of immediate deportation.
Surveys show that most Americans — including a majority of Republicans — support allowing the young immigrants, known as Dreamers, to stay. But the president’s hard-line advisers, including Stephen Miller, the architect of his immigration agenda, have urged the president to follow through on his promise to his conservative supporters.
After the ruling on Thursday, allies of the president had urged him not to give up.
“DACA was an illegal use of executive authority from the start. Clearly, an illegal policy must be reversed in order to restore the rule of law,” said Rosemary Jenks, the director of government relations for NumbersUSA, a group that pushes for reduced immigration.
“The Court’s decision to require the administration to jump through additional procedural hoops to terminate an unlawful program that was created without jumping through those same hoops makes no sense,” she said.
Mr. Trump did not say when his administration will issue a new order terminating the DACA program, and it remains unclear what will happen in the meantime. Before the court’s ruling on Thursday, the DACA program had been in limbo — protecting existing recipients but closed to new applicants.
Supporters of the program had hoped the administration would be required to return it to full operation in the wake of the court’s ruling. And they urged Mr. Trump to abandon his efforts to eliminate it.
“President Trump should forego any further efforts to wind down the DACA program before the election, and Congress should get to work right away to permanently address the status of DACA recipients and the broader Dreamer population,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, the director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Instead, the president appears to be following the same playbook he used when courts blocked his efforts to impose a travel ban early in his administration. After two versions of the ban were rejected, the Supreme Court approved a third version, which remains in effect today.
