DACA has always been more trouble than it's worth

At the same time, DACA's defenders face a different question: whether the program is even worth fighting for in the first place.

I'll spare you the suspense: It isn't.

DACA was always an empty gesture, a sorry excuse for the comprehensive immigration-reform solution Obama should have come up with. As a pro-labor Democrat who was sympathetic to claims that employers use illegal immigrants to deny jobs to working-class Americans, legalizing the undocumented was never going to be Obama's cause. He just fooled a lot of people on the left into thinking he cared about what happened to the undocumented, even as he was deporting about 3 million of them.

Still, Obama needed a tool to patch up his relationship with Latino voters during his 2012 re-election campaign. So Obama took the easy way out instead of working with Congress to pass a catch-all immigration reform bill that secured the border, provided guest workers for employers and legalized undocumented immigrants. He simply issued an executive action that gave young people who were brought here as children by their parents (so-called Dreamers) a two-year reprieve from deportation and a temporary work permit.

But what the executive branch giveth, the executive branch can taketh away.

And that's just what the Trump administration did. Worse, Trump now has -- thank you, Obama -- the personal information of the nearly 700,000 Dreamers who agreed to this Faustian bargain because they believed the people from the government when they said they had come to help them. How well would you sleep at night if you and other members of your family are undocumented and know that Trump is president and has access to all of your information?

DACA offers false hope, and it puts in peril the very group that it sought to protect. It also acts as a pressure valve to make members of Congress comfortable with doing nothing to fix the main problem -- the fact that an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants are living in the United States.

Truth is, DACA has always been more trouble than it's worth. It was a bad idea, and it was proposed by people with bad intentions. So, if the courts decide to back the White House and end it, good riddance.

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Ruben Navarrette's email address is ruben@rubennavarrette.com. His daily podcast, "Navarrette Nation," is available through every podcast app.