Supreme Court Against Trump Administration In DACA Case
The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the administration’s plan to dismantle an Obama-era program that has protected more than 600,000 so-called “Dreamers” from deportation. The vote was 5-to-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing the opinion.
Under the Obama program, qualified individuals brought to the U.S. as children were given temporary legal status if they graduated from high school or were honorably discharged from the military, and if they passed a background check. Just months after taking office, Trump moved to revoke the program, he was blocked by lower courts and now the Supreme Court.
“We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies,” Roberts wrote. “The wisdom of those decisions is none of our concern. Here we address only whether the Administration complied with the procedural requirements in the law that insist on ‘a reasoned explanation for its action.'”
In 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions simply declared DACA illegal and unconstitutional. “Such an open-ended circumvention of immigration laws was an unconstitutional exercise of authority by the executive branch,” he said at the time. Sessions argued that the program should be rescinded because, in his opinion, it was unlawful from the start.
But, as Roberts observed, the attorney general offered no detailed justifications for cancelling DACA. Nor did the acting Secretary of Homeland Security at the time, Elaine Duke, who put out a memo announcing the rescission of DACA that relied entirely on Sessions’ opinion that the program was unlawful.
As Roberts noted, Duke’s memo didn’t address the fact that thousands of young people had come to rely on the program, emerging from the shadows to enroll in degree programs, embark on careers, start businesses, buy homes, and even marry and have 200,000 children of their own who are U.S. citizens, not to mention that DACA recipients pay $60 billion in taxes each year.
That memo, which provided additional reasons for canceling the program, came out nine months after the rescission of DACA, after lower courts had already started blocking the cancellation.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the principal dissent, accusing Roberts of writing a political rather than a legal opinion. Joining him were Justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito, with separate dissents also filed by Alito and Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
But lots of Republicans are relieved as well. If today’s decision had gone the other way, the pressure on congressional Republicans to pass legislation protecting the “dreamers” would have been intense.
DACA is an astonishingly popular program, with recent polls showing up to 85 percent support among Democratic and independent voters, and huge majorities among Republican voters as well.
The recent Supreme Court decisions, not only on DACA, Sanctuary Cities, Census, and others, tell you only one thing, we need NEW JUSTICES of the Supreme Court. If the Radical Left Democrats assume power, your Second Amendment, Right to Life, Secure Borders, and…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2020
Indeed, 200 major corporations filed briefs in the Supreme Court supporting the DACA recipients. Among them Microsoft, which was a plaintiff in one of the cases that made it to the Supreme Court, and its President Brad Smith.
“There are more than 30,000 DACA registrants working in the health space alone. We’ve needed these people more than we do today,” he said. “Every time I meet with them, I have the same reaction. We are lucky as a country to have them.”
