Supporters of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program display a banner as they demonstrate on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House on Sept. 3, 2017. | Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo Obama to speak out if Trump ends DACA

Former President Barack Obama plans to speak out if President Donald Trump declares his intention to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, according to a person close to Obama.

Trump is expected to announce on Tuesday that in six months, he will terminate the Obama-era DACA initiative, which grants two-year work permits to undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and stayed out of trouble. POLITICO first reported the news.


Obama used executive actions to launch the program in June 2012, providing assurances before his re-election that he would protect the so-called "Dreamers." Trump had suggested in the past that he didn’t want to deport Dreamers, saying in April that they should “rest easy,” but the immigration hawks in his administration have argued that DACA is an illegal program.

Obama’s current plan is to post a statement on Facebook and link to it on Twitter, where the former president has more than 94 million followers. In his final presidential press availability, he suggested that he would speak out if Trump went after the Dreamers — and that it was one of the few issues where he would feel morally compelled to do so. He said he would not remain silent in the face of “efforts to round up kids who have grown up here and for all practical purposes are American kids, and send them someplace else, when they love this country.”

In fact, Obama has largely avoided direct criticism of his successor, even though some of his supporters have clamored for him to lead the resistance to Trump, even as Trump has repeatedly attacked him by name and tried to roll back his legacy. The thinking in Obama’s inner circle is that he must choose his spots to join the national debate, trying to remain above the fray, focus on his foundation, and let other Democrats take the lead. He wants to follow the traditions of other post-presidents, and he isn’t eager to engage in fights with a political brawler who’s always looking for a foil to rally the Republican base.

POLITICO Playbook newsletter Sign up today to receive the #1-rated newsletter in politics Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

“The single most important thing I can do,” Obama told an audience of students in April, is “help in any way I can to prepare the next generation of leadership to take up the baton and to take their own crack at changing the world.”

One of a series of tweets Obama sent after the violence in Charlottesville became the most shared tweet of all time, but it was a quote from Nelson Mandela, not an explicit criticism of Trump. Obama also issued statements denouncing the Republican efforts to dismantle Obamacare, but even those did not mention Trump by name.

But it’s Trump who’s taking aim at DACA, not Congress, even though just last Friday the president told a group of faith leaders that “we love the Dreamers … we think the Dreamers are terrific.” Trump could change his mind about the program between now and Tuesday, so the person close to Obama stressed that the statement he’s prepared in case of an attack on DACA could change. But the fate of the Dreamers is an issue the former president feels strongly about, those close to him say, and he warned in his last presidential news conference on Jan. 18 that he would not let the program end without a fight.

“The notion that we would just arbitrarily or because of politics punish those kids, when they didn’t do anything wrong themselves, I think would be something that would merit me speaking out,” he said at the Jan. 18 news conference.

As news spread of Trump’s apparent decision to stop protecting the Dreamers, Obama’s former aides were all over Twitter attacking it. “This is as cruel and capricious a public policy decision that any President has made in a very long time,” said his former communications director, Dan Pfeiffer. Last night, the source close to Obama said the president will not stand by quietly while immigrants whose parents brought them to this country are subjected to deportation.

"Back to a country they don't know with a language they don't speak?" the person close to Obama said. "It's cruel."



