Trump Says He Would Let ‘Dreamers’ Stay. But He Once Tried to Gut the Program.

President-elect Donald J. Trump has said he would look for ways to spare immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children, known as Dreamers, from deportation.

But during Mr. Trump’s first presidency, he tried to wipe out the program protecting them. He failed only because the Supreme Court stopped him.

Mr. Trump’s stance on immigration, and on Dreamers in particular, is riddled with contradictions. Whatever he ends up doing when he takes office carries major implications for some 500,000 people who have built lives in the United States, and often have no connections at all to the countries where they were born.

“We have to do something about the Dreamers because these are people that have been brought here at a very young age,” Mr. Trump said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “And many of these are middle-aged people now. They don’t even speak the language of their country.”

Mr. Trump said he would work with Democrats on a plan and blamed them for not protecting Dreamers. But in fact, it was President Barack Obama who first took executive action in 2012 to spare Dreamers from deportation through a policy called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.

On Sunday, Mr. Trump seemed surprised that President Biden had not passed a law to protect Dreamers from efforts to gut the program, like Mr. Trump’s own attempt in 2017.