The Supreme Court blocks Trump’s bid to cancel the DACA immigration program on Thursday. The decision will protect young immigrants shielded from deportation.
President Donald Trump failed to win a set of cases over his effort to cancel the Obama-era immigration program known as DACA or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
The Supreme Court’s decision will provide protection for hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who have been allowed to get work permits under the program. When Trump ordered for the cancellation of the program in September 2017. there were about 700,000 DACA recipients under it.
The 5-4 vote was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative. The court’s liberals, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the decision. Roberts pointed out that ending the program was “arbitrary and capricious” and contradicts federal law that covers administrative procedure.
“We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies. ‘The wisdom’ of those decisions ‘is none of our concern,’” Roberts wrote.
“We address only whether the agency 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,” Roberts added.
“That dual failure raises doubts about whether the agency appreciated the scope of its discretion or exercised that discretion in a reasonable manner,” he noted.
As a political candidate, Trump affirmed that he would cancel DACA “immediately.”
“As President of the United States, I am asking for a legal solution on DACA, not a political one, consistent with the rule of law,” Trump wrote in a post on Twitter Thursday afternoon. “The Supreme Court is not willing to give us one, so now we have to start this process all over again.”
Justice Clarence Thomas, who was supported by fellow conservatives Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, announced that the majority decision “must be recognized for what it is: an effort to avoid a politically controversial but legally correct decision.”
“Today the majority makes the mystifying determination that this rescission of DACA was unlawful. In reaching that conclusion, the majority acts as though it is engaging in the routine application of standard principles of administrative law. On the contrary, this is anything but a standard administrative law case,” Thomas wrote.
“Politically charged” court decisions
When the DACA opinion was released, Trump reasoned that the decisions show “we need more justices or we will lose our 2nd. Amendment & everything else.”
Trump said that the “horrible & politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives.”
In a subsequent tweet, Trump stressed: “Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?”
He later promised to produce “a new list of Conservative Supreme Court Justice nominees” by September, which he said he will pick from if a vacancy on the court opens up.
The White House did not give a comment on the ruling.
Obama’s ideals
Meanwhile, former President Barack Obama, who established the DACA program in 2012, tweeted that eight years ago “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,” Obama wrote.
He noted that, “now to stand up for those ideals, we have to move forward and elect @JoeBiden 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.”
Joe Biden applauded the decision on Thursday through a statement. He said that if Trump makes another move to stop DACA, “he will be responsible for upending the lives of hundreds of thousands of young people and bringing harm to families and communities all across the country.”
In his statement, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who led a group of 20 states and D.C. supporting DACA before the top court, said that “we prevailed on behalf of every Dreamer who has worked hard to help build our country — our neighbors, teachers, doctors, and first responders.”
“The highest court in our land saw through the Trump Administration’s illegal, baseless excuses. The court agreed: If you work hard and play by the rules, you deserve a chance to get ahead,” Becerra said.
Meanwhile, Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., shared that he “cried tears of joy” when the ruling was announced.
“These wonderful DACA kids and their families have a huge burden lifted off their shoulders. They don’t have to worry about being deported, they can do their jobs, and, I believe, I do believe this, someday, someday soon, they will be American citizens,” Schumer said.
