White House claims DACA recipients take jobs away from Americans

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday in a press briefing that participants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program are taking jobs from American citizens. 

Sanders’s remark came hours after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced President Trump’s decision to end DACA, which allowed people brought to the United States illegally as children to apply for protection from deportation and for work permits.

“I think that it’s a known fact that there are over 4 million unemployed Americans in the same age group as those that are DACA recipients,” she said, citing “large groups of people that are unemployed that could possibly have those jobs.”

Sessions also said that the immigrants brought into the country illegally were taking jobs away from American citizens in his Tuesday announcement.

In 2012, Trump rejected the idea that immigrants with work permits were taking jobs away from American citizens, CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski noted.

“A lot of the jobs that these people have, a lot of other people don’t want,” Trump said.

“We have to show some compassion,” Trump said. “We can’t just throw everybody out.” 

In 2012 when Trump was doing a segment on DACA Fox and Friends he rejected the notion undocumented immigrants took American’s jobs pic.twitter.com/vDIkddq90X

— andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) September 5, 2017

“But again, we’re looking for fixes. We’re not looking for complaints, but we’re looking for solutions. And that’s our focus moving forward,” Sanders added.