Emanuel pressures Trump to keep Obama immigration program

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Wednesday pressured President-elect Donald Trump to continue the Obama administration program shielding young undocumented immigrants from deportation. 

{mosads}During a private meeting at Trump Tower, Emanuel handed Trump a letter signed by more than a dozen mayors urging him not to follow through on his campaign pledge to scrap the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

“All of us fundamentally believe that these are students, these are also people who want to join the armed forces, they gave their name, their address, their phone number, where they are, they’re trying to achieve the American Dream,” Emanuel, President Obama’s former top White House aide, told reporters after the meeting. 

“It’s no fault of their own their parents came here,” he added. “We should embrace them rather than do a bait-and-switch.”

In a private meeting, Mayor Emanuel hand-delivered a letter from US mayors to the President-Elect urging him to continue the DACA program. pic.twitter.com/MQgxENfSai

— ChicagosMayor (@ChicagosMayor) December 7, 2016

The signees include leading liberals such as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee. 

The letter highlights the difficult choices Trump faces as he seeks to turn his tough talk on immigration into action. 

If he fulfills his pledge to eliminate the program, he would please his supporters who view Obama’s 2012 directive as an egregious example of executive overreach. 

But Democrats, and some Republicans, argue it would upend the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who have signed up for the program. 

More than 740,000 people have received deportation reprieves and work permits since the initiative began, according to government data.

In recent days, Trump has been coy about whether he’ll follow through on his promise to revoke the program. 

He did not back off his promise to cancel the executive order during an interview published Wednesday with Time magazine. But he said he might work out an accommodation for those benefitting from DACA. 

“We’re going to work something out that’s going to make people happy and proud,” he said. “They got brought here at a very young age, they’ve worked here, they’ve gone to school here. Some were good students. Some have wonderful jobs. And they’re in never-never land because they don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Trump’s meeting with Emanuel was unexpected, given the prominent role the mayor played in the Obama White House. The president-elect met with his brother, talent agent Ari Emanuel, late last month.

Emanuel said he also spoke about “White House operations, how to make that work,” with Trump, incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Stephen Bannon.

Trump spokesman Jason Miller said the president-elect took the Wednesday meeting in order to hear a different perspective. 

“As we’ve seen with the president-elect, he’s taken a broad range of meetings from people with good ideas and advice on particular issues, whether it’s economic development or safer communities or improving national security,” Miller told reporters. 

Jonathan Easley contributed.