WASHINGTON — When Attorney General Jeff Sessions appeared before news cameras at the Justice Department in early September 2017 to announce that President Trump was ending deportation protections for young undocumented immigrants, he knew the administration had left itself more legally vulnerable than it should have.
At a contentious meeting in the White House Roosevelt Room several days earlier, Elaine C. Duke, then the acting secretary of homeland security, had broken with the rest of Mr. Trump’s team and balked at its demand that she issue a memo ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program known as DACA that shields immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.
Ms. Duke was deeply bothered by the idea that she could be responsible for deporting hundreds of thousands of young people from the country they considered their own, according to several people familiar with her concerns. And she did not want her name on what she saw as anti-immigrant policy rationales put forth by Mr. Sessions; Stephen Miller, the president’s powerful immigration adviser; and others who argued that the program encouraged new waves of illegal immigration and was an undeserved amnesty.