US President Donald Trump has scrapped a programme that protects from deportation hundreds of thousands of people who were brought into the United States without documents as children.

Trump’s action, announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Tuesday, rescinds a programme called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) which helped almost 800,000 young men and women get a legal status, work permits and driving licences.

The temporary reprieve was created by Democratic former president Barack Obama in 2012, and is supported by Democrats and many business leaders.

The Trump administration said no current beneficiaries of the programme would be affected before March 5.

Sessions said the action does not mean the DACA recipients are “bad people”.

“To have a lawful system of immigration that serves the national interest, we cannot admit everyone who would like to come here. It’s just that simple. That would be an open-border policy and the American people have rightly rejected that,” Sessions said.

He said the programme “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same illegal aliens to take those jobs”.

The move marked the latest action by Trump that is sure to alienate Hispanic Americans, a growing segment of the US population and an increasingly important voting bloc.

Most of the immigrants protected by DACA, dubbed “Dreamers”, came from Mexico and other Latin American countries.

Jackie Cortes, a DACA recipient who came to the United States from Mexico at the age of nine, told Al Jazeera the programme helped her attend secondary school and allowed her to work “the proper way”.

“I’m able to feel a part of the place that lived for more than half of my life,” said Cortes.