Monday was supposed to be the deadline either when illegal immigrant Dreamers began to lose their status under the Trump administration’s phaseout of the Obama-era DACA deportation amnesty, or when Congress would swoop to the rescue and grant them a path to full citizenship rights.

Instead, the week dawns with the program still mostly intact, thanks to the courts. Meanwhile, Congress is stalemated and immigrant rights activists are vowing political retribution on the lot of them — though President Trump takes the brunt of their anger.

“I love the Dreamers,” the president said at a dinner with reporters Saturday. “I’ll be honest. … I really believe the Republicans want to solve this problem — DACA — more than the Democrats and certainly faster. So we’re all working together, and I hope that something’s going to happen. I really do.”

Some lawmakers say they could revisit the issue by March 23, which is when the next spending bill is due. But even then, it’s not clear what a deal would look like, with neither House conservatives nor congressional Democrats eager to meet at Mr. Trump’s middle ground.

Under the Obama administration, nearly 96.8 percent of Dreamers applying to renew their two-year permits were approved. Under the Trump administration, the approval rate has reached a stunning 98.9 percent.

The Trump administration announced the phaseout of the program on Sept. 5, saying it had concluded the program was unconstitutional, couldn’t be defended in court and needed to be wound down.

So far, interest has been moderate.

From Jan. 10 to Jan. 31, some 11,360 people had applied for renewals.

Perhaps more stunning is that the Trump administration still has nearly 22,000 DACA requests from people who have never been approved for the program. Since initial DACA requests were cut off on Sept. 5, that means those people had been waiting for at least five months.

Fewer than 150 were approved from Oct. 1 to Jan. 31. Although the Trump administration has been generous with its renewals, it has been more strict with initial applications, with an approval rate below 80 percent. The Obama administration notched an initial approval rate of more than 92 percent from 2012 through the end of 2016.

Homeland Security officials insist nothing has changed, and they are processing the applications under normal prioritization and in accordance with the same rules as before.

As of Jan. 31, some 683,000 people were being protected by DACA. All told, since the beginning of the program more than 807,000 people had been approved. But about 125,000 of them either allowed their status to lapse, found some other legal avenue to remain in the U.S. or — in about 2,000 cases — had their DACA protections canceled because of criminal or gang activities.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news...-not-congress/