President Donald Trump may end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program by Friday, meaning almost 1 million young immigrants face imminent deportation.
NBC News reported last week that the program was discussed during a White House meeting on Thursday between Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has argued against DACA, and Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Friday that the program "continues to be under review."
Ending the program "would be a grave moral and legal error," according to Vanita Gupta, director of the Leadership Conference on Human Rights and former leader of the Justice Department's civil rights division in the previous administration.
"Killing the DACA program as the Trump administration's first post-Charlottesville move would be absolutely shameful," she added. "We must not allow the hate violence that we saw on the streets of Charlottesville to become the guiding force for policy making."
About 900,000 undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before they were 16 years old are enrolled in the program, the oldest being around 37 years old. Although its unlikely that Dreamers, as those enrolled in the program are known, will be targeted for deportation, they have arrested Dreamers who they claim are gang associates.
"I feel like I cannot make a decision about my life because it could go either way," Itzel Guillen, who came to the U.S. from Mexico with her family at age five, told The Los Angeles Times. "It's difficult to live in that uncertainty every day."