By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--September 8, 2017
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Obama often misappropriated the term "prosecutorial discretion," but rarely as blatantly as he did here. The correct use of the term would mean that a prosecutor looks at an individual case and decides if it warrants action against a suspect, based on the evidence in the case and a whole host of other factors. Obama tried to twist the phrase to mean that entire classes of people would never be charged with a crime, or that entire laws themselves would never be enforced. That is not prosecutorial discretion. That's the president unilaterally changing the law. Ending DACA doesn't mean that we're going to round up these people tomorrow and ship them all back to wherever they came from. It means we're going to use real prosecutorial discretion, looking at each case on its merits and prioritizing where to take action. And when circumstances warrant, it's possible someone who's been here since their youth will be sent back.
That would obviously be unwelcome news for that person, but the law is the law and no country can survive if it wantonly ignores its own laws but doesn't have the courage to actually change them via the legislative process. That's what the left wants to do here - keep the laws on the books but simply ignore them at the whim of the president. Or I should say, at the whim of the last president. When this president tries to actually enforce the laws that are already on the books, people seem to freak out.The only thing Obama's DACA really amounts to is the president telling immigration officials: Don't enforce the law with respect to this particular class of people. That is not real protection. It is an executive decision to look the other way when you've got a very large problem that needs a solution with legal standing to it. Trump's actual solution is even more generous to the DREAMers than I had envisioned, as Andrew McCarthy explains:
The only “action” Trump has taken is to bar new DACA applications for six months, starting now. Over those same six months, though, any pending applications will continue to be considered (and, in the main, granted, you can bank on it); and any two-year work permits that would otherwise expire will be reauthorized. But if the program is unconstitutional because a president has no authority to confer, among other things, such positive legal benefits as work permits, what is the legal rationale for continuing it for another half-year (having already continued it for eight months), during which the work permits will continue to be issued and honored? Now, after all of Attorney General Sessions’s huffing and puffing yesterday, Trump not only announces that he wants the program legalized; he further signals that he is prepared to continue going Obama’s executive-action route if Congress cannot get a bill passed. If you are a congressional Democrat, why would you agree to anything but a straight-up codification of DACA? What conceivable reason would you have to negotiate and make concessions on the improvements discussed in our NRO editorial on DACA yesterday — border security, E-Verify, or the RAISE Act?
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