Gov. Brown urges Trump to keep DACA program

California Gov. Jerry Brown urged President Trump on Friday to keep a federal deportation protection program for people brought to the country illegally as children.

“To uproot these young people from the only country they have known as home is to turn our back on the future,” Brown wrote in the letter. “It is cruel and it runs counter to the ideals this country was founded on.”

Trump is considering whether to end the five year old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that has allowed some people brought to the country illegally to stay.

About a quarter of the more than 750,000 people in the DACA program live in California, a fact Brown noted in the letter.

Trump has sent mixed messages on whether he would continue the program since the Republican took office in January. But Republican attorneys general for Texas and nine other states have given the Trump administration an early September deadline to end the program or be sued.

Brown also urged the president to work with Congress to pass the DREAM Act, a bipartisan bill that would provide a path to citizenship for DACA recipients.