While President Trump’s opponents took to the streets Tuesday to protest his decision to end Obama-era protections for young undocumented immigrants, his core supporters loved it.

Politically, Trump’s decision Tuesday to rescind the 5-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was a valentine to his base, the 39 percent of Americans who approve of the job he’s been doing and for whom immigration is a driving issue.

The question is whether any near-term support Trump gains from his base is worth the long-term damage he may incur by potentially alienating the rapidly growing Latino and Asian American voting blocs — particularly in California, home to an estimated 200,000 people in the DACA program, more than any other state.

However, to Trump supporters like Randall Jordan, the president’s decision was a matter of keeping a campaign promise to end former President Barack Obama’s immigration policy, which was implemented by executive order.

Jordan, a San Luis Obispo contractor, appreciated seeing action on immigration reform after years of watching Congress accomplish nothing. He believes Trump was trying to deal compassionately with the young immigrants, known as “Dreamers,” who were brought here as children, even though the president’s action could ultimately cause them to lose legal protections against being deported.

Plus, Jordan thought Tuesday’s move was good public policy.

“He’s doing the right thing — presidents shouldn’t be making executive orders,” Jordan, said referring to Obama’s original DACA order. “And he’s being compassionate — he’s giving (the Dreamers time) to figure out what to do.”

Jordan represented the 79 percent of Trump voters for whom immigration was an important issue, behind only “the economy” and “terrorism,” in the 2016 election, according to a Pew Research survey. It was far lower on the priority list for Hillary Clinton backers.

Conservatives like West Walker, a schoolteacher from Stockton who is state chairman of Californians for Trump, feel that immigrants covered by DACA “are a privileged class — they were getting special rights. That isn’t right at a time when there’s a lot of needs in the state.”

But attitudes toward undocumented immigrants are more sympathetic across California. Half the state’s residents say they worry “a lot” (30 percent) or “some” (21 percent) that someone they know could be deported, according to a May survey from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

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Despite that compassion, few conservatives expect the fate of the DACA program to swing many voters in the 2018 midterm elections — even in the nine California Congressional districts held by Republicans where Clinton received more votes than Trump and that have been targeted by Democrats. Several of those districts, located in the Central Valley and Southern California, have significant numbers of Latino voters.

Orange County Republican Party chairman Fred Whitaker said the four targeted GOP Congressional members whose districts touch his county all opposed Obama’s DACA executive order because they felt it was unconstitutional, “not because they wanted to throw anyone out of the country.”

Even though Orange County has an increasing number of new immigrants, Whitaker said, “I don’t think this is going to move any voters either way.”

If anything, some Trump supporters said the president may gain from his action, which was forced by nine Republican state attorneys general who said they would take legal action if Trump didn’t end DACA by Tuesday.

San Diego resident Woody Woodrum said the president was “backed into a corner,” knowing that Obama’s order would likely be overturned by the courts. He applauded Trump for telling Congress to pass comprehensive immigration legislation that would include protections for the Dreamers.

“The president is doing what a good executive does,” said Woodrum, who is president of the California Screaming Eagles, a conservative group.

Still, he remained skeptical of Washington’s taking action. “How rapidly has Congress acted in the past? In the past, they haven’t taken to the task.”

California Republican Party Chairman Jim Brulte hopes that changes.

“The California Republican Party favors comprehensive immigration reform and urges Republicans and Democrats in Washington to work with the Trump administration to craft a comprehensive immigration package that addresses DACA and every other element of the immigration debate,” Brulte said in an email.

Yet while a few Congressional Republicans, like House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., have expressed sympathy for those covered by DACA in recent days, “there are no votes in the House” for legislation to protect them, said Jim Carafano, a policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank. The hope of passing a comprehensive immigration package is even more remote, he said.

If an immigration bill were to surface, even one tailored narrowly just to cover those covered by DACA, Carafano said conservatives would try to kill it by saying, “‘It starts with the Dreamer kids. Then you’ll want their parents to get amnesty, too. Then, hey, why not do it with everyone’” who is in the country illegally?

On Tuesday after his decision was announced, Trump tried to appeal to both his base and those outside it, saying that he had “a love for these people, and hopefully, now Congress will be able to help them and do it properly.”

Fred Schein, president of the Log Cabin Republicans of Marin County, had mixed feelings.

“I don’t want to see them punished for their error of their parents,” said Schein, who lives in Mill Valley. But at the same time, he didn’t think it was right for Obama to bestow protections on them through executive action. “It may be one of those situations where there is no happy solution.”

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli

DACA discussion

To see a Facebook live discussion of DACA with Chronicle senior political writer Joe Garofoli and editorial page editor John Diaz, go to: http://bit.ly/2eIwpfZ