President Trump told The Associated Press in an interview Friday that "DREAMers," young immigrants who were brought to America illegally as children, should not fear deportation because they are not being targeted. DREAMers can "rest easy," the president said, because his administration is "not after the DREAMers; we are after the criminals."
The DREAMer label comes from the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which has not passed at the federal level, despite repeated introductions in Congress since 2001, but is implemented in modified forms in some states.
On Tuesday, a 23-year-old man named Juan Manuel Montes, a DREAMer, sued the Trump administration for deporting him earlier this year. Montes appears to have had an active Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status, which should have prevented deportation. Trump told the AP Montes is "a little different than the DREAMer case," but did not say why.