The United States Supreme Court threw President Donald Trump a major setback to his radical immigration policy on Thursday, blocking his attempt to end a program that protects hundreds of thousands of immigrants – often called immigrants – from deportation “Dreamers” – who entered the United States illegally as a child. .
Judges in a 5-4 vote confirmed lower court decisions that concluded that Trump’s 2017 decision to cancel the Deferred Action Program for Arrivals of Children (DACA), created in 2012 by his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, was illegal.
Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts joined the four Liberals in finding that the administration’s actions were “arbitrary and capricious” under a federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act.
The decision means that the approximately 6.49,000 immigrants, mostly young Hispanic adults born in Mexico and other Latin American countries, currently enrolled in DACA will remain protected from expulsion and will be able to obtain work permits. renewable for two years.
The decision does not prevent Trump from trying to end the program again. But his administration is unlikely to be able to end the DACA before the November 3 elections in which Trump is seeking a second four-year term.
“We do not decide whether the DACA or its revocation are sound policies. We only examine whether the agency has complied with the procedural obligation to provide a reasoned explanation for its action,” Roberts wrote.
The ruling marks the second time this week that Roberts has ruled against Trump in a major case after Monday’s ruling finding that gay and transgender workers are protected by federal employment law.
“These horrific and politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun explosions in the faces of people who are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives,” Trump wrote on Twitter after the DACA decision.
The other four court curators, two of whom were appointed by Trump, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, were dissidents.
“Today’s decision must be recognized for what it is: an effort to avoid a politically controversial but legally correct decision,” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting.
Thomas, whose dissent was joined by Gorsuch and judge Samuel Alito, said that the DACA itself was “substantially illegal”.
The Trump administration has argued that Obama went beyond his constitutional powers when he created the DACA by executive action, bypassing Congress.
A set of states, including California and New York, people currently registered with the DACA and civil rights groups, have all filed lawsuits to block Trump’s plan to end the program. The lower courts of California, New York and the District of Columbia have ruled against Trump and left the DACA in place, finding that his decision to revoke the program violated administrative procedure law.
Only one justice, the liberal Sonia Sotamayor, accepted the plaintiffs’ arguments that the policy could have been motivated by discriminatory prejudices against immigrants. Sotamayor is the first Hispanic judge of the court.
Trump has cracked down on legal and illegal immigration, including continuing to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, a central part of his presidency and re-election campaign in 2020.
“I feel the content”
DACA recipients and their congressional supporters, including Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and the business community, welcomed the move and called for permanent protections.
“I feel satisfied. I think the decision was what we deserved, but at the same time I also think we still have to defend the program,” said Melody Klingenfuss, 26-year-old DACA recipient and organizer with California Dream. Network.
A year ago, Roberts also voted decisively in a Supreme Court loss to the Republican president when judges prevented the Trump administration from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census which critics say , was an effort to dissuade immigrants from participating in the ten percent of the population. The case raised similar questions about whether the Trump administration had followed legal procedures in a political decision.
Immigrants had to meet certain conditions to be eligible for registration with the DACA, such as not being convicted of a felony or serious offense and being enrolled in high school or having a diploma in secondary school or equivalent.
Government figures show that more than 95% of current registrants were born in Latin America, including 80% in Mexico, followed by El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Almost half live in California and Texas. The average age of DACA registrants is 26 years old.
Obama created the DACA program after Congress failed to pass bipartisan legislation that would have overhauled US immigration policy and offered protections to immigrants known as “Dreamers”, a nickname derived from the name of a project immigration law.
The immigrant youth for whom the program was designed, said Obama, were raised and educated in the United States, grew up as Americans, and often know little about their country of origin. After Thursday’s decision, Obama wrote on Twitter: “We may seem different and come from everywhere, but what makes us American are our common ideals.”
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
