Around 11 am yesterday (Sept. 5), Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced on behalf of President Donald J. Trump that the White House plans to discontinue the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. First implemented by President Obama as an Executive Order 2012, DACA protects the status of illegal immigrants who crossed the United States border at age 16 or younger and grants them the opportunity to live, work, and enjoy social services in the United States. DACA recipients maintain temporary status which they are required to renew every two years.

In order to obtain this deferral, DACA stipulates that immigrants are enrolled in high school, have a GED or a high school diploma, or have been honorably discharged from the United States Armed Forces.

The decision is one that directly affects senior Priscilla Roman.“My cousins on my mom’s side are DACA recipients, and they just got jobs, and I’m nervous about what’s going to happen to them,” Roman said, “I think Trump isn’t taking into consideration all the things DACA recipients give to the country.”

According to Sessions, implementing DACA without express congressional approval stretched beyond the jurisdiction of the Executive Branch, and the controversy it caused outweighed its benefit. “Our collective wisdom is that the policy is vulnerable to the same legal and constitutional challenges that the courts recognized with respect to the DACA program,” Sessions said in his statement, “which was enjoined on a nationwide basis in a decision affirmed by the Fifth Circuit.”

The Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) program, similar to DACA, granted illegal-immigrant parents of American citizens a three-year work permit, which could be renewed, and protection from deportation. The Trump Administration rolled back DAPA, another Obama reform, on June 15.

Trump took to Twitter to address the matter. In a tweet early this evening (Sept 5), he said, “Congress now has 6 months to legalize DACA (something the Obama Administration was unable to do). If they can’t, I will revisit this issue!”

Junior Annette Njei sent a text message to her Illinois State Representative urging Congress to work to save DACA. “I wrote that most Americans are foreigners because we pushed out the Native Americans and put them on reservations,” Njei said, “and we are just being ignorant to the fact that they’re humans and they deserve to be here, and they deserve to live a stable life and get an education while also trying to get their citizens’ papers.”