With a federal court order from last week temporarily blocking President Donald Trump's move to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the immigration agency in charge of that effort announced that it would again accept applications to renew DACA requests, as President Trump chided Democrats on Sunday over the political impasse on the issue.
"Due to a federal court order, USCIS has resumed accepting requests to renew a grant of deferred action under DACA," the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced on Saturday.
"Until further notice, and unless otherwise provided in this guidance, the DACA policy will be operated on the terms in place before it was rescinded on Sept. 5, 2017," the USCIS stated.
While that matter works its way through the courts, President Trump on Sunday was blasting Democrats over failed political efforts to reach a deal on the future of some 800,000 illegal immigrant "Dreamers" under DACA.
"DACA is probably dead because the Democrats don't really want it," the President tweeted from his Florida retreat at Mar-a-Lago.
Last week, there were earnest efforts by a number of lawmakers in both parties in Congress to reach a DACA deal - Mr. Trump has repeatedly made clear that he wants to help the "Dreamers," but only if Democrats agree to money for his border wall, an end to chain migration, and an end to a visa lottery for people.
But those efforts ran aground last Thursday, as the President railed against the idea of providing more immigration slots to people from Haiti and African nations, as the term "shithole" countries created a furor in the U.S. and around the world.
Democrats have been pressing to get a DACA deal included in a spending deal which would fund the operations of the federal government, as Republicans and the President have been pushing to include a big increase in defense spending in that same package.
So far, no deal has been struck, and what may happen is that Congress will simply extend a temporary funding measure to avoid a government shutdown; the current temporary budget runs out on Friday, January 19.
A bipartisan group of six Senators had reached an agreement on an immigration deal, but it was rejected by the President as a "big step backwards."
As for the injunction against the administrative end to the plan, which Mr. Trump announced last September, it wasn't clear when the Trump Administration would make its next legal move in the case.
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