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A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

Video: Trump, Sessions on DACA


In this week’s video with FactCheck.org, CNN’s Jake Tapper reviews how President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions characterize the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program.

In announcing the phase out of the Obama-era DACA program, Sessions described DACA recipients as “800,000 mostly-adult illegal aliens.”

That same day, Trump also described the DACA beneficiaries as adults when he was asked about ending the program during an unrelated event at the White House. The president said “people think in terms of children, but they’re really young adults.”

The administration’s emphasis on the current age of most DACA holders ignores the fact that they arrived in the United States as children. Tom K. Wong, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, oversaw a national survey of 3,063 DACA holders last month and found that on average they were six and a half years old when they arrived in the U.S. Most of them — 54 percent– were under the age of 7 (see page 13).

The video is based on our story, “Spinning the Facts on DACA.” Past videos as part of our collaboration with CNN’s “State of the Union” can be found on our website.