OAKLAND, Calif. — Maybe you’ve heard this story line before. With the blithe stroke of a pen and without congressional approval, President Obama gave legal status to a vast population of immigrants who entered the country unlawfully — because he wanted to, and because he found a way.

I’m referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. That program is called DACA, which until the recent presidential campaign was an acronym known by few beyond the nation’s immigrant communities or the Washington beltway. Now DACA is trending news, and not in a good way.

This narrative about an initiative that has given temporary haven and work authorization to more than 700,000 undocumented minors, the so-called Dreamers, still has critics howling about presidential overreach, about brazen nose-thumbing at the rule of law and about encouraging others to breach the borders of the United States.

But there’s a problem with this take on the program. It is dead wrong. While much has been made about our incoming president possibly eliminating DACA with his own swift pen stroke, there has been scant attention paid to the careful, rational and lawful reasons for creating the program, which, especially now that its future is in doubt, merit a closer look.