Ted Cruz threw a bomb into the immigration crisis yesterday by demanding that any emergency bill to address the tide of minors surging across the border had to include a provision repealing President Obama’s so-called mini-DREAM executive action. Formally known as DACA, it 
directs prosecutors not to spend any time trying to deport individuals who arrived in the US as children.
This is inconvenient for Republicans because DACA is pretty popular and they’d probably prefer to ignore it. So why did Cruz do this? Greg Sargent thinks there’s a long game at stake:
I strongly suspect much GOP rhetoric over the crisis is designed to achieve maximum constraint on Obama’s sense of what’s politically possible on unilaterally easing deportations. Case in point: Ted Cruz’s declaration that any GOP response to the crisis must defund Obama’s deferred-deportation program. Cruz has a history of revealing underlying political calculations with unvarnished clarity. He justified the government shutdown to stop Obamacare by arguing that once the law kicked in, people would like it and it would never be repealed.
Something similar may be happening on deportations. As Frank Sharry argues, Obama action on deportations could “permanently cement the reputation of the Democrats as for immigrants and for the changing American electorate and Republicans as against it.” It’s unclear how ambitious Obama will be. But given Cruz’s fevered view of #ObummerTyranny, he probably expects Obama to go big, and he may agree so doing would lock in Latinos for Dems. Hence the move to preclude it.
….However, there’s a risk for Republicans. If they punt on their current response, it could persuade Obama he can position himself as the only problem solver in the room on immigration, giving him more space to act unilaterally. Of course, to reap these benefits, Obama will have to be seen as managing the current crisis effectively. And he has not accomplished this — politically or substantively.
I’ll confess that I usually don’t give politicians credit for thinking much beyond the ends of their noses. Even gaming things out one move ahead is beyond most of them. But Cruz is a smart guy, and going after DACA is probably a twofer for him: it’s politically useful in the short term, marking him as the most aggressive conservative in the Senate; and it might constrain Obama in the future.
But as Sargent says, this cuts both ways. If Obama decides that Republicans, once again, are simply unwilling to deal in any way, then he’s left with very little reason to moderate his actions. Compromise only makes enemies among Hispanic voters, after all, and it’s worth it only if Republicans will give him something in return. If they won’t, he might as well take the boldest action he can to help his party, and then dare Republicans to do something about it. That may well be how this plays out.
