“This administration is attacking families, is breaking apart families, creating fear and hurting children,” Blanc said. “We have children who are in fear for their parents, wondering if their mom or their dad will be home when they arrive from school.

“We have to start asking ourselves, ‘Is that the America we want to live in and are those demands appropriate?’ Absolutely not,” she said.

DACA is an Obama-era program that allowed immigrants who were brought here illegally as children to be protected from deportation for two years at a time and get work permits – but it did not change their citizenship status.

Critics have called it an executive overreach, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in September that the Trump administration would end the program on March 5. No new DACA applications are being accepted, and people whose coverage lapses after March 5 could be subject to deportation.

Sessions and Trump said the six-month “winding down” of the program would give Congress time to act on a replacement plan. But David Bier, an immigration analyst at the CATO Institute, said the latest Trump demands are “poisoning the well” and undermining any chance for bipartisan negotiation on a replacement bill.