In an interview with the Bohemian on Tuesday, Sonoma County’s interim sheriff Rob Giordano says that Trump’s decision to repeal the Obama-era DACA program, which protected the immigrant children of undocumented immigrants from deportation, would serve to undermine the very trust that SCSO is trying to build and maintain in the communities it serves. “We will not have any involvement with that policy,” Giordano says. “On a human level, it undermines trust,” he adds, noting that the harsh proposed rollout to destroy DACA, delivered by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, could make it less likely for “regular people in the community,” to come forward and work with law enforcement in the shared pursuit of public safety.
Giordano’s comments come as state lawmakers held a press conference Tuesday afternoon on the planned destruction of DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which was implemented by Obama in 2012 and gave some 800,000 young people protections against deportation.
Trump’s public hand-wringing over the issue saw the puny-fingered amoral wreck of a fake president punt to a right-wing revanchist congress that showed no willingness to work with President Barack Obama when he proposed the Dream Act as a legislative solution to a human problem—but is now charged with the task of working up a DACA replacement in the next six months, to avoid the appearance that this is all being driven by an obsession with demolishing the Obama legacy.
Sen. Mitch McConnell immediately praised Trump’s move to end DACA so we’ll see how that proposed legislative process works out.
Many if not most Dreamers were brought here by their parents when they were kids and only know life as residents, if not official citizens, of the United States. Under Obama, they were encouraged to come out of the shadows and participate in the program. In a widely publicized moment of bitter irony, one registered Dreamer, Alonso Guillen, was killed while rescuing Americans during Hurricane Harvey, almost at the very moment Trump was conspiring to give the young man the boot.
