Protesters urged the administration not to end the DACA program outside the White House over the weekend. (Photo by Rachel Sadon)

The administration of President Donald Trump is ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, closing off new applications immediately and rescinding protections for current recipients in six months.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the decision today, calling the program enacted under a 2012 executive order signed by President Barack Obama an “open-ended circumvention of immigration laws” that “contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors” and “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s acting secretary, Elaine Duke, said in a letter to internal staff that the “orderly wind down of the program” will begin today.

It leaves the fate of 800,000 DREAMers in the hands of Congress, which has failed to pass similar legislation for years and also has several other major legislative pushes in the months ahead.

“Congress, get ready to do your job – DACA!” Trump tweeted this morning.

In a lengthy statement released an hour after Sessions’ announcement, the president echoed many of the same themes. “The Attorney General of the United States, the Attorneys General of many states, and virtually all other top legal experts have advised that the program is unlawful and unconstitutional and cannot be successfully defended in court,” Trump said. “There can be no path to principled immigration reform if the executive branch is able to rewrite or nullify federal laws at will.”

A number of Republicans have said both privately and publicly that they don’t support the move to end DACA.

“President Trump’s decision to eliminate DACA is the wrong approach to immigration policy at a time when both sides of the aisle need to come together to reform our broken immigration system and secure the border,” said Arizona Senator John McCain in a statement after Sessions’ announcement. “While I disagreed with President Obama’s unilateral action on this issue, I believe that rescinding DACA at this time is an unacceptable reversal of the promises and opportunities that have been conferred to these individuals.”

Trump’s decision was widely expected, bringing dozens of protesters to the White House over the weekend, though administration officials cautioned that nothing was final until the formal announcement. A few hundred people demonstrated on Tuesday morning in front of the White House, and marched down Pennsylvania Avenue towards the Trump Hotel.

Reporting from Politico, the New York Times, and elsewhere painted a picture of a White House deeply divided and the president looking for “a way out” of the situation.

A Pew research study conducted before Trump took office found that the program is broadly popular; nearly three quarters of the electorate said it is very or somewhat important that immigrants who came illegally as children be allowed to stay in the country. In an interview shortly after inauguration, Trump seemed to pivot, saying that DREAMers “shouldn’t be very worried. I do have a big heart. We’re going to take care of everybody.”

Still, the president’s hardline stance on immigration is among the issues that excite his base the most, and he made ending the DACA program a prominent campaign pledge.

“We believe this is the responsible path,” Sessions said, focusing on the the constitutionality of Obama’s executive order and putting the onus on Congress to act.

The attorney general didn’t take questions from reporters, including if the government will act on the personal information that DACA recipients provided the government.

In a statement, Trump said his administration’s “enforcement priorities remain unchanged” and DHS has been advised that “DACA recipients are not enforcement priorities unless they are criminals, are involved in criminal activity, or are members of a gang.”

Meanwhile, the outrage to the announcement was immediate.

This post has been updated with Trump’s statement.