The Justice Department launched a frontal assault Tuesday on a judge's ruling that protected beneficiaries of the DACA program from the threat of its termination in March.

The Department of Justice said it would go directly to the Supreme Court to establish that the White House can legally shutter Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era executive order that offered deportation protection and work permits to hundreds of thousands of people who entered the U.S. illegally as children.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup granted a request a week ago to block the administration from ending DACA while lawsuits play out. He also ordered the administration to resume accepting renewal applications from people already enrolled in the program.

'It defies both law and common sense for DACA ... to somehow be mandated nationwide by a single district court in San Francisco,' Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement.

Fighting mad: U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Tuesday that he will go directly to the Supreme Court to push back against a federal judge who blocked the administration from ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program

President Donald Trump is using the threat of DACA's demise in March as leverage to get Democrats to agree to fund his proposed border wall, but the judge's ruling took that piece of the puzzle out of his hands

The DACA program has pitted immigrants' rights groups against conservatives who voted for Trump because of his promise to get tough on immigration

Sessions noted that DACA was 'an entirely discretionary non-enforcement policy that was implemented unilaterally by the last administration,' and that Congress had previously 'rejected similar legislative proposals.'

The central legal question surrounding the latest DACA episode is whether the President of the United States can issue an executive memo to cancel what a previous president established in the same fashion.

Republicans want to use the threat of DACA's cancelation as leverage to bring Democrats to the table as they seek billions in funding for border control measures including a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

The DOJ said Tuesday that it intends to appeal Alsup's order to the Ninth Circuit, a traditionally liberal judicial panel.

At the same time, it's planning this week to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a final appeal before the California-based appeals court acts.

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke, who issued the memorandum last fall spelling out how DACA would wind down, 'acted within her discretion to rescind this policy,' Sessions said Tuesday.

He called the direct appeal to the Supreme Court 'rare' but said it was being done 'so that this issue may be resolved quickly and fairly for all the parties involved.'

Protesters calling for an immigration bill supporting DACA demonstrated in the office of Senator Chuck Grassley on Capitol Hill in Washington on Tuesday

A Quinnipiac University poll released last week found that a massive majority of Americans want DACA beneficiaries to be able to stay in the U.S. and apply for citizenship

President Donald Trump objected last week to the fact that attorneys looking to stop him from ending the DACA program chose the nation's most liberal venue to do it.

'It just shows everyone how broken and unfair our Court System is when the opposing side in a case (such as DACA) always runs to the 9th Circuit and almost always wins before being reversed by higher courts,' Trump wrote on Twitter.

Earlier, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders had said in a statement that '[w]e find this decision to be outrageous.'

Trump has drawn criticism in recent years for his attacks on judges who issue rulings that displease him. He branded one a 'so-called judge' after the first version of his nation-specific travel ban was ruled unconstitutional.

In another case during the presidential campaign, he claimed a Mexican-American judge's ethnicity rendered him unable to rule fairly in the Trump University case.

The federal court system is 'broken and unfair,' Trump said last week, pointing to the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco as fertile hunting ground for liberal partisans seeking friendly rulings

DACA has protected about 800,000 people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children or came with families who overstayed visas. It includes many college-age residents.

The Trump administration announced in September that it would cancel DACA, citing a threat from a coalition of 10 states, led by Texas, to challenge the program's constitutionality.

Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez lashed out at Trump last week, saying his move to rescind DACA 'was never about the rule of law. It was about deporting Dreamers and using them as bargaining chips in future political negotiations while holding their futures hostage.'

Trump has insisted repeatedly that any congressional deal to save DACA must be tied to funding for his border wall.