06/18/2020 Tungol Law Headline News "Supreme Court Rules Against Trump Administration In DACA Case"

Reports from NPR and the Washington Post provided news that the Supreme Court on Thursday rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to dismantle the program protecting undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children, a reprieve for nearly 650,000 recipients known as “dreamers.”

A narrowly divided U.S. Supreme Court extended a life-support line to some 650,000 so-called DREAMers on Thursday, allowing them to remain safe from deportation for now, while the Trump administration jumps through the administrative hoops that the court said are required before ending the program.

The vote was 5-4 with Chief Justice John Roberts casting the decisive fifth vote that sought to bridge the liberal and conservative wings of the court.

Roberts and the court’s four liberal justices said the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act. (Read the decision here.)

In his opinion, Roberts wrote: “The appropriate recourse is therefore to remand to DHS so that it may reconsider the problem anew.”

President Trump dismissed the ruling as “politically charged,” turning it into a rallying cry for the 2020 election and the opportunity to appoint more conservative justices. The DACA decision follows another major ruling earlier in the week that granted employment protections for LGBTQ people.

The administration has tried for more than two years to “wind down” the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, announced by President Barack Obama in 2012 to protect from deportation qualified young immigrants. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions advised the new Trump administration to end it, saying it was illegal.

But, as lower courts had found, Roberts said the administration did not follow procedures required by law, and did not properly weigh how ending the program would affect those who had come to rely on its protections against deportation, and the ability to work legally.

“We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies,” Roberts wrote.

Read the Supreme Court’s DACA decision

He added: “We address only whether the [Department of Homeland Security] complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action. Here the agency failed to consider the conspicuous issues of whether to retain forbearance and what if anything to do about the hardship to DACA recipients. That dual failure raises doubts about whether the agency appreciated the scope of its discretion or exercised that discretion in a reasonable manner.”

He was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in the most important parts of the opinion.

The court’s four most conservative justices dissented. Justice Clarence Thomas said the program was illegal, and that the court should have recognized that rather than extending the legal fight.

“Today’s decision must be recognized for what it is: an effort to avoid a politically controversial but legally correct decision,” Thomas wrote. “The court could have made clear that the solution respondents seek must come from the legislative branch.”

Instead, he said, the court provided a “stopgap” measure to protect DACA recipients, and “has given the green light for future political battles to be fought in this court rather than where they rightfully belong — the political branches.”

He was joined by Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh dissented on other grounds. He said that even if the department had not provided adequate reasons initially for ending the program, it has since supplied them, and should not have to start over.

Immigration advocates were euphoric over the court’s actions.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D), who led a coalition of 20 states and the District of Columbia in bringing the fight, said ending DACA “would have been cruel to the hundreds of thousands of Dreamers who call America home, and it would have been bad for our nation’s health.”

He said Congress should “permanently fix our broken immigration system and secure a pathway to citizenship.”

Obama responded on Twitter as well: “Eight years ago this week, we protected young people who were raised as part of our American family from deportation. Today, I’m happy for them, their families, and all of us. We may look different and come from everywhere, but what makes us American are our shared ideals,”

And he put in a plug for presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, his vice president. He said future reform depends on electing Biden “and a Democratic Congress that does its job, protects DREAMers, and finally creates a system that’s truly worthy of this nation of immigrants once and for all.”

Barnes, Robert. “Supreme Court rules against Trump’s attempt to end DACA, a win for undocumented ‘Dreamers’ brought to U.S. as children.” The Washington Post, June 18, 2020, available on the web at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-rules-against-trump-administration-attempt-to-end-daca-a-win-for-undocumented-immigrants-brought-to-us-as-children/2020/06/18/4f0b6c74-b163-11ea-8758-bfd1d045525a_story.html?itid=ap_robertbarnes

Totenberg, Nina. “Supreme Court Rules Against Trump Administration In DACA Case.” NPR, June 18, 2020, available on the web at https://www.npr.org/2020/06/18/829858289/supreme-court-upholds-daca-in-blow-to-trump-administration?fbclid=IwAR3DsHr8QTJVAR_gNGkOgVZ9idsep2Gy8SS_xvvVPp1a5lMnYhpRTqgFDQM

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