On September 5, the Trump administration — just as Houston started looking ahead at a long, expensive, and painful recovery and as Hurricane Irma loomed off the coast — announced that it would end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a program that provides protection from deportation to young undocumented immigrants who came to this country as children. This move, if Congress doesn’t act, will mean that some eight hundred thousand people, young people who have grown up in the United States, will be eligible for deportation. This, even by the brutal standards of this country’s history of immigration enforcement, is spectacularly cruel.

Daniel Denvir, host of the Jacobin podcast The Dig, spoke with César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a professor of law at the University of Denver, about what exactly DACA is and why it’s so important to fight for its survival. You can listen to the interview here.