Racism Seen by Judge as Perhaps Why Trump Axed `Dreamer' Policy

(Bloomberg) -- A judge said maybe racism was behind President Donald Trump’s decision to shut down a program protecting young undocumented immigrants from deportation.

Days after blocking the Trump administration from rescinding the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, U.S. Judge William Alsup said comments by the president since his inauguration suggest he may harbor “racial animus towards Mexicans and Latinos.”

Alsup cited as examples the president’s remarks that the Mexican government “send(s) the bad ones over,” and that undocumented immigrants are “animals” who are responsible for drugs and violence in the U.S. "These statements were not about the rescission (which came later) but they still have relevance to show racial animus against people south of our border,” the San Francisco judge said in a filing Friday.

Trump derided the court system as “broken and unfair” after Alsup on Tuesday ordered the administration to temporarily keep the so-called Dreamer program in place. Alsup said in Friday’s filing that those who are challenging the phase-out the policy can try to revise arguments that he rejected as flawed.

To contact the reporter on this story: Kartikay Mehrotra in San Francisco at kmehrotra2@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Elizabeth Wollman at ewollman@bloomberg.net, Peter Blumberg

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