Supreme Court Will Hear Trump Bid to End Obama's DACA Program
Supreme Court Will Hear Trump Bid to End Obama's DACA Program
(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear President Donald Trump’s bid to end deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants, taking up a politically explosive issue likely to be resolved in the heat of next year’s election campaign.
The administration is challenging rulings that blocked it from rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, begun under President Barack Obama. Lower courts have said the Trump administration’s explanation -- that the program is illegal -- isn’t adequate.
The decision to intervene comes a day after the high court ruled that the Trump administration hadn’t provided a sufficient justification for its plan to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census. The Supreme Court will hear arguments and rule in the term that starts in October and runs through June 2020.
DACA, as it’s known, protects young people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. Applicants are shielded from deportation and allowed to apply for work permits.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in November that the Department of Homeland Security “acted based on an erroneous view of what the law required.” Like other courts, the panel left open the possibility the administration could rescind the policy for other reasons, but Trump’s team hasn’t tried to take that step.
U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco, the administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer, told the justices in court papers that “the rescission is reasonable in light of DHS’s serious doubts about the legality of the DACA policy.”
Defenders of DACA say it’s simply a broad exercise of the president’s accepted power to set priorities in deciding who should be deported. Opponents argue that federal immigration laws don’t let the president shield such a large category of people.
The Trump administration had pushed the justices for quick action on DACA, filing three Supreme Court appeals of trial judges’ decisions last year even before appellate courts had ruled. But the Supreme Court deferred acting for more than five months, an unexplained delay that kept the issue off the docket during the current term, the first with new Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The administration moved to rescind DACA in September 2017 in the face of a threatened legal challenge by Republican-led states, including Texas. In a one-page letter, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions told Elaine Duke, acting Homeland Security secretary at the time, that she should end the program because it was an “unconstitutional exercise of authority by the executive branch.”
Duke said the following day she was rescinding the policy. DACA recipients, known as Dreamers, had been scheduled to lose their protected status starting in March 2018 before a federal trial judge intervened.
Those challenging the cancellation include Democratic-led states, DACA recipients, universities, labor unions and Microsoft Corp.
In defending DHS’s conclusion that DACA is illegal, the administration points to a 2015 decision from a different federal appeals court, the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit. That ruling blocked a related Obama-era program, known as DAPA, which would have shielded as many as 4 million unauthorized immigrants, including parents of the Dreamers.
DAPA Program
The 5th Circuit panel said Obama exceeded his authority under federal immigration law. The DAPA case then went to a shorthanded Supreme Court, which divided 4-4, upholding the ruling without setting a nationwide precedent.
“The DACA policy is materially indistinguishable from the related policies that the 5th Circuit held were contrary to federal immigration law in a decision that four justices of this court voted to affirm,” Francisco argued.
Lower court judges have said the two programs contain important differences. One part of the 5th Circuit’s reasoning was that DAPA intruded on detailed rules Congress set out in the Immigration and Nationality Act for people who are trying to use their children’s immigration status to secure legal status for themselves.
“There is no analogous provision in the INA defining how immigration status may be derived by undocumented persons who arrived in the United States as children,” Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote for the 9th Circuit in the DACA case.
To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, Laurie Asséo, Ros Krasny
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