As Sessions was making his widely anticipated announcement a few blocks away at the Department of Justice, the crowd grew quiet.
"It's right now official," Torres told them. "... This Administration just ended DACA."
In Manhattan, about a dozen protesters blocked traffic on 5th Avenue, near Trump Tower. They sat in the street, arms locked. After about 10 minutes New York police began warning that they would be arrested if they did not leave voluntarily.
Erika Andiola, 30, from Mexico was among those who was taken into custody without incident. A DACA recipient, she has been in United States since she was 10. She said that the undocumented community has come out of the shadows through DACA, and was not going back.
"Trump is trying to scare us into hiding, to get us to back down," she said. "We're not going to back down."
President Barack Obama's initiative cleared the way for young undocumented immigrants to get driver's licenses and jobs, and to more easily afford college.
But critics, including Trump and Sessions, say Obama overstepped his authority in creating DACA, making an end run around Congress after it failed to pass legislation that would have offered immigrants similar protections.
Opponents of DACA say it wrongly skirts US border restrictions and opens up to undocumented immigrants jobs that should be reserved for legal residents.
"DACA was an unconstitutional abuse of executive authority by President Obama," said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. "As President Obama stated when he implemented DACA, there were no guarantees that the programme would continue after he left office."
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump vowed to end DACA "immediately". But he later wavered and said he would treat the young beneficiaries "with heart".
In June, Texas and several other states urged Trump to end DACA and threatened to take him to court if he didn't.
The states, which had mounted a successful legal challenge in federal court to a similar programme that would have benefited the undocumented parents of US citizens and green-card holders, have until today to amend that lawsuit to include DACA.
After Sessions' announcement, scores of protesters left the White House and headed for the Department of Justice. They loudly jeered and booed as they marched in front of the Trump Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, then sat down a block away in the middle of the intersection, in front of the U.S. Department of Justice.
"Yes we can," they chanted in English and Spanish.
Rebecca Ruiz, a 56-year-old who works in housekeeping, came from Pittsburgh to march for her son, a 24-year-old DACA recipient, who she brought from Mexico City when he was 12.
The young man now has a good job at a bank and speaks better English than Spanish, Ruiz said. She described herself as "scared and sad" for both her son and the country they now call home.
"Mexico is now bad and dangerous, I came here looking for a better life for me and my family. That is why we're here," Ruiz said. "This is my son's home."
