The White House on Tuesday defended President Trump's controversial decision to end an Obama-era immigration program while lashing out at critics who said he lacked compassion for those affected, calling Democrats “heartless” for fundraising off the issue.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that has protected about 800,000 young people known as “Dreamers” was “made with compassion.”

“But you cannot allow emotion to govern,” Sanders said. “There’s a lot of people I’ve seen attacking the president for not showing the level of compassion he should."

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"To me, the most heartless thing I’ve seen all day today is Democrats like [House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi [Calif.] using this decision for fundraising while the president is trying to fix the situation. They’re politicizing the situation instead of doing their job. If they’d spend less time fundraising and more time focusing on solutions we wouldn’t be in this problem in the first place.”

Pelosi lent her name to a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) fundraising email seeking donations based on the decision to phase out DACA.

“It’s heartless,” the email stated. “We cannot let President Trump destroy the lives of thousands of immigrant children just to attack President Obama’s legacy.”

The president had publicly wrestled deciding on the fate of the Obama-era immigration program, saying at times that “we love the Dreamers” and that he wanted to address the issue with “heart.”

The administration has said that deporting those protected under DACA would not be an enforcement priority for the federal government.

Speaker Paul Ryan Paul Davis RyanKenosha will be a good bellwether in 2020 At indoor rally, Pence says election runs through Wisconsin Juan Williams: Breaking down the debates MORE (R-Wis.) expressed optimism that Congress would use the six-month phaseout window to find a legislative solution that might allow “those who have done nothing wrong” to continue to “contribute as a valued part of this great country.”

“If Congress doesn’t want to do the job they’re elected [for], maybe they should get out of the way and let someone else do it,” Sanders said Tuesday.

One reporter challenged Sanders about whether the decision to end the protections was “cold hearted.”

“It’s not cold hearted for the president to uphold the law,” Sanders said. “We are a nation of law and order, and the day we start to ignore the fact we’re that we throw away the reason these people wanted to come to this country.”