DOJ lawyers defending the Trump administration's decision to rescind the DACA program have asked a federal judge in San Francisco to disregard the president's December tweet haranguing congressional Democrats regarding his immigration priorities.

On Dec. 29, the president tweeted, ”The Democrats have been told, and fully understand, that there can be no DACA without the desperately needed WALL at the Southern Border and an END to the horrible Chain Migration & ridiculous Lottery System of Immigration etc. We must protect our Country at all cost!”

U.S. Department of Justice lawyers wrote Friday the tweet came four months after the rescission and is irrelevant to what motivated the acting Homeland Security secretary—the official responsible for the decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Besides, the government lawyers contend, the tweet itself does not indicate the decision to rescind DACA was aimed at gaining leverage to move forward with the administration's immigration agenda.

“The determination by the then-acting secretary of Homeland Security that DACA should be rescinded is a separate question from the terms on which the president would support congressional legislation,” the DOJ lawyers wrote.

Lawyers challenging the DACA rescission—a team that includes Covington & Burling, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, Altshuler Berzon and attorneys with the California attorney general—asked U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California to supplement the record with the tweet, claiming it reveals the government's stated rationale that the policy move was meant to curtail litigation risks was bogus.

“The president's tweet in Exhibit A explicitly proposes a trade of DACA for anti-immigration legislation and a border wall, and thereby further supports the inference that defendants rescinded DACA not for the reasons they stated, but to create this bargaining opportunity,” the lawyers said.

Earlier this month, Alsup asked DOJ lawyers to weigh in on whether they had objections to him taking judicial notice of the tweet, and what significance it might have on the plaintiffs' motion to block the rescission.

Prior to Friday's filing, Justice Department lawyers previously told at least one federal judge in Washington, D.C., that the government treats the president's tweets as “official statements.” In that case—a Freedom of Information Act brought by Politico reporter Josh Gerstein seeking information related to a summary of the so-called “Steele dossier” provided to President Donald Trump—U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta of the District of Columbia similarly asked DOJ lawyers in November to illuminate how the government views the president's tweets, and “how official they are.”

Although the government lawyers in the D.C. case acknowledged the tweets are attributable to the president, they argued that plaintiffs were “not entitled to clarification of what the president has chosen to say.”

In an opinion issued Thursday, Mehta found that tweets didn't amount to “official acknowledgment” of the requested documents in the FOIA case, which would have undermined government efforts to keep records secret. “[I]t does not follow that just because a tweet is an 'official' statement of the president that its substance is necessarily grounded in information contained in government records.” Mehta wrote.