A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.
Conservatives mostly praised Trump’s rescinding of DACA on Tuesday. The Federalist’s David Harsayani called DACA “one of the most blatant circumventions of ‘democratic norms’—those things that so many people on cable news channels keep lecturing us about”:
There are a vast number of solid economic and moral arguments for legalizing the children of illegal immigrants. In substance, I agree with DACA. Yet, the justification given by the president and his allies at the time was summed up best by The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, who then argued that the “only reason President Obama has to act on immigration reform is that House Speaker John Boehner won’t.”
For one thing, this an admission that DACA was abnormal. The Constitution makes no allowance for the president to write law “if Congress doesn’t act.” Moreover, it offers a bigger question: Is Robinson’s rationalization in play for all presidents, or only the ones liberals agree with? If Congress doesn’t build a border wall or enact tax reform (or act on any of the policies the President views as imperative), is Trump free to act because of DC inertia?
At National Review, Andrew McCarthy wrote that Trump should follow the Constitution in ending the measure.
Trump should do what he should have done his first day in office. He should declare the Obama-administration guidance null and void. Having sworn to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, he could explain that, while he would certainly execute any accommodations Congress enacts for “dreamers,” the president has no authority to confer positive legal benefits — such as work permits — on aliens. Trump could remind the public that President Obama himself publicly admitted he did not have the constitutional power to do what DACA does.
[…]In any event, President Trump has made the DACA issue more complicated than it needs to be. It may be a hard problem, but his solution, within the limitations of his office, is straightforward: Follow the Constitution; end the program because it is illegal; employ prosecutorial discretion responsibly; refute the hysterical nonsense that ending DACA will result in mass deportations of aliens who are, for all intents and purposes, Americans; show good faith by supporting temporary legislative measures that help aliens already in the DACA program; and hammer out a legislative compromise — making it clear that if Democrats really want to move dreamers out of legal limbo, they cannot stubbornly refuse to work with Trump and negotiate with Republicans.
Commentary’s Noah Rothman expressed concern about the manner in which Dreamers may now be deported. “To be eligible for work and residential status, DACA recipients actually had to demonstrate that they were illegal residents,” he explained. “They provided the government with a substantial trove of information about themselves that now may, in theory, be used to round them up and remove them from the only country of which most of them have any memory. Even if conservatives believe DACA to be a misuse of presidential authority, the exercise of federal power in that manner would be a gross abuse of the public trust.”
Fred Bauer of National Review chimed in to note the perils of congressional Republicans attempting a DACA fix. “In a politically polarized time, depressing the grassroots probably harms the GOP’s midterm chances more than disappointing some swing voters does, but both inflict a cost,” he wrote. “[R]epublicans might be wise to push for both enforcement and immigration-reform commitments in a DACA deal.”
Breitbart’s John Nolte listed “14 Things the [Mainstream Media] Won’t Tell You About DACA.” Topping the list is the argument that Dreamers’ situations are the fault of their immigrant parents. “My wife was born in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and came to America as a small child,” he wrote. “But she was brought here by her parents legally and remained here legally until she obtained her citizenship, something she prizes above most everything else. This is how immigration is supposed to work. If you ask my wife about DACA, she blames the parents of these children who, unlike her own parents, broke the law and put their children in this situation.”
Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw warned that sympathetic profiles of Dreamer’s like the Los Angeles Times’ recent article on undocumented taquero and activist Romulo Avelica Gonzalez, are on the way. “golly, Romulo is pretty much a gosh darn hero, isn’t he?” he wrote. “He gives an impassioned statement to the reporter about how, ‘we have to do something to stop … the separation of families. Because it’s not just us who suffer in there. Our kids also suffer. They’re citizens.’ What receives much less attention in the article is that fact that Avelica Gonzalez was making more than tacos during his time in California. He also showed up in court for receiving stolen vehicle license plates. It’s a relatively petty charge to be sure, but it’s still a violation of the law.”
On Fox and Friends, LifeZette’s Laura Ingraham agreed that there has been too much focus on immigrant “sob stories”:
For every sob story — and there are many of them, and unfortunate ones you can pull out for illegal immigrants here — I can up you a sob story or a difficult circumstance from an American citizen, as Donald Trump called them during the campaign, ‘the forgotten men and women,” she said. “Those forgotten men and women who showed up were Hispanics, they were African-Americans, they were people from all walks of life.
On Twitter, the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro argued that DACA isn’t likely to truly end:
And at Gateway Pundit, Christina Laila hit immigrant rights protesters who demonstrated in front of Trump Tower for chanting in Spanish. “No better way to show you want to be an American than to chant in Spanish while you are in the U.S. illegally,” she wrote. “Genius.”
