WASHINGTON, DC — New polling released yesterday by CBS News underscores the overwhelming public support for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The poll found that 85 percent of Americans, including 73 percent of Republicans and 84 percent of Independents, believe that immigrants who came to the U.S. as children should be allowed to stay. As soon as next week, the U.S. Supreme Court could allow President Trump to terminate DACA.

“It is hard to think of precedent for an incumbent White House to do absolutely everything in its power to bring about a crisis in which they’re on the wrong side of 85 percent of the public, especially one with the intensity of opposition to their efforts to strip away DACA recipients’ ability to work and stay in this country,” said FWD.us President Todd Schulte. “Yet again, we see that even the hardline anti-immigrant groups—those who have spent decades trying to purge Dreamers from the U.S.—are coming forward to admit that they realize that President Trump ending DACA months before his election is likely a political disaster, in addition to the moral and humanitarian disaster we all know it is.”

Hardline anti-immigrant organizations who had no difficulty advocating for family separation at the border have publicly expressed political concerns about Trump moving forward with terminating DACA before the election:

• FAIR, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group and extremist anti-immigrant group, called on the Trump Administration to begin “a six-month wind-down” of the program rather than terminating it immediately.
  The executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies (also a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group) has previously said that ending DACA in the middle of an election year would present “a political challenge.”

These groups have led the charge to end DACA—and now they’re worried it could spell electoral doom for President Trump and his party, and want to punt until after the election and hope voters won’t hold them accountable. It is clear that hardliners throughout the Administration are more concerned with their policy wishlist than politics — as we have seen in the past — so no one should be under any illusion that there are easy fixes, especially in the months before an election.

Even if the Supreme Court rules that the President can move ahead with terminating DACA, that does not mean he is required to do so. He still can and should keep it alive — and for once, perhaps he should listen to the anti-immigrant movement who knows their efforts to throw the lives of 700,000 in chaos will bring deep pain at the ballot box to the President.